If I were ChatGPT right about now, I think I would have an extremely big head. Why? Because everywhere I turn, I would see blog posts and news articles declaring me to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. Apparently, I can do just about anything.

In all seriousness, there is a lot of excitement surrounding ChatGPT and similar conversational artificial intelligence (AI) tools. But much of the excitement is terribly misplaced. Do not misunderstand, ChatGPT is a revolutionary tool in the pursuit of creating computers that can closely mimic human conversation. But it is limited in its capabilities. Nothing about AI is not unlimited. It cannot do everything people imagine it can.

Smart Homes with Voice Control

This post was inspired by another published on the TS2 website in early July, 2023. The TS2 post was all about the advantages of combining ChatGPT with smart home devices. In essence, the writer’s point was that ChatGPT makes it possible to control smart home devices with your voice.

Guess what? That was possible before ChatGPT became the hottest thing in technology. What makes ChatGPT so special here? Its creators have vastly improved on natural language processing (NLP), which is what makes it possible for the tool to mimic human conversation in a chat setting. But NLP is not new technology. Neither is the base on which ChatGPT has been built.

Google has been working on NLP for years. Ditto for Amazon. That is why both of their smart speakers have offered voice control from the very beginning. Granted, first-generation smart speakers struggled to get voice commands right. Even more recent devices can struggle, and that might be where ChatGPT has an advantage. But do not believe Google and Amazon will sit idly by while ChatGPT’s makers surpass them in NLP technology.

It Has To Be Built-In

It is one thing to write an article encouraging people to harness ChatGPT to control their smart homes with voice. It’s an entirely different matter to actually do it. ChatGPT isn’t a plug-in. You can’t buy ChatGPT and pair it with your smart lights to control them with your voice.

To make it work, you need some sort of central control panel or hub that supports voice recognition and NLP. On top of that, ChatGPT needs to be installed on the device as a software product. Finally, the device must have some sort of cloud connection in order to fetch and process the data that makes it all work.

You more or less have to buy an off-the-shelf device with ChatGPT capabilities built-in or build a device yourself. Building devices is perfectly fine for the techie crowd. Most of us, however, have no clue how to do it nor any interest in learning. ChatGPT doesn’t make our smart homes any more efficient unless it’s built-in to the devices we buy.

Voice Control Is Possible Without It

The fact is that voice control is possible in a typical smart home even without ChatGPT. A smart home system from Vivint Smart Home offers voice control through either Google or Amazon smart speakers. Done and done.

People are wildly enthusiastic about ChatGPT. I get it. I am fascinated with the tool myself. But it isn’t capable of doing as much as people suspect. ChatGPT’s abilities are actually rather rudimentary in the sense that all it does is search for data, analyze it, and return it in a conversational way.

If you want to use it with your smart home system, it needs to be built-in to your devices. Either that or you need to build your own devices.