Every automation platform launch this year has pitched the same future: talk to your house, and it listens. Alexa+ remembers your preferences across sessions. Google folded its camera AI into a paid tier. The entire industry is racing toward voice and AI as the interface, as if pressing a button is something we're all meant to grow out of. KNX Association published a piece in May making the opposite case, and I think they're right. Tactile buttons aren't a legacy holdover wai

Two of the biggest smart home companies on the planet just ran a live demonstration of what "your house runs on someone else's server" actually means, and it happened this year, not in some hypothetical future. Starting in February, Amazon opened Alexa+, its generative AI assistant, free to its entire US Prime base, more than 200 million members. Multiple outlets reported that Prime-linked Echo devices were being auto-upgraded without a prompt or an opt-in, so owners had no w

Berker is gone. Not gone as in bankrupt, gone as in folded. At Light + Building in Frankfurt back in March, Hager announced that its switch and socket business is moving out from under the Berker name and into a single Hager-branded range. A hundred years of a name I've written on more spec sheets than I can count, retired in one press release. Normally a rebrand is nothing to write about. This one is, because of what Hager built into the replacement. What's actually changing

Home Assistant's open-source voice assistant now rivals Alexa and Google Home, running fully locally with no cloud dependency. Here's what changed, and why it fits a KNX build.