7 IoT Predictions for 2017

2016 was the breakout year the Internet of Things was waiting for. The rise of voice control introduced the magic of the smart home to a new crop of consumers. Early connected car concepts showed us how seamless home automation on the road could be. Big tech companies articulated visions for their own platforms with eye-turning partnerships, software releases, and hardware launches. Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Jarvis — the AI assistant he built as his personal challenge for the year.

Some say 2017 will be the year the Internet of Things moves into the mainstream. I’d argue that we’re already there. Next year will instead see advancements in IoT that make it more subtle, immersive, and pervasive. Namely, it will become a technology that we expect to exist behind-the-scenes to make life a little bit easier. The trajectory will be similar to the rise of the Internet in the 90s.

With that in mind, here are seven industry trends I expect will come to life in the year ahead:

1. IoT becomes more like Her, less like The Jetsons: How? The introduction of humanistic passive interfaces. Perhaps a small display next to the front door that shares notifications about where family members are. Or maybe your lights discreetly changing color to indicate someone is at the front door. Early attempts at this type of experience include Nucleus and Birdi, but the first breakout products will hit the marketplace in 2017.
2. Security gets worse before it gets better: Expect more attacks like the Mirai botnet this fall. Unless the government and industry start working together to put common sense regulations into place, the road will continue to be rocky.
3. Benefits (and limitations) of voice control become clear: Voice control is great, but it only takes your smart home so far. Connected devices can do so much more than just being turned on/off with a quick voice command. In 2017, we’ll see voice as one puzzle piece fitting into a mesh of interfaces, like passive displays, each appropriate for different purposes.
4. Smart cities will be about intelligent roads: 2016 was all about replacing inefficient street lights with LEDs to save energy. In 2017, the focus will be on smart roads, and building them around the idea that self-driving cars can’t do it all by themselves. They need hints and signals that are embedded into our transportation infrastructure and improve existing sensor fusion based models (which are built around onboard information sources like Lidar). A beacon on a stop light that relays information about traffic, routing info and unexpected conditions via Bluetooth, for example.
5. Huge focus on third-party services: There’s only so many lightbulbs, locks, and thermostats out there. In 2017, the smart home won’t stop at the home. Expect major UX improvements that pave the way for entirely new, more immersive experiences: the UPS guy having controlled access to your front door, for example.
6. Tangible machine learning applications surface: Machine learning became a household phrase in 2016. Next year you’ll see major advances in how it can improve the smart home. The biggest opportunity for machine learning? Taking the burden off the user to enable creative smart home use cases one might not come up with on their own.
7. Smart home setup is eliminated: One of the biggest hurdles to making the smart home mainstream is the setup process. Smart home companies will ditch the instruction manual approach to create truly plug-and-play solutions.