One of the hallmarks of utopian science fiction is that stuff just works. In the far-ish future of Star Trek, doors never fail to open when a person approaches them and the computer always understands commands perfectly. We live in a pretty startling time, technology-wise. Things that seemed completely fantastical 20 years ago are now cheap and easily available. The thing is… they just kinda suck. A bit. I have a smart speaker in my house that will pretty competently tell me how long to roast a chicken for but absolutely refuses to play music by the band OM. The face recognition in Google Photos thinks that I am about three different people. Things tend to fall just short of being a seamless experience.
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Take, for instance, a smart doorbell that locks you out of the house because it scanned a picture of Batman that was on your t-shirt instead of your actual face and decided you were a stranger.
My @nest doorbell automatically locks the front door when it sees a face it doesn’t recognize. Today it didn’t recognize me, so I went into the app to investigate and… pic.twitter.com/qcgE4Ii1pn
— B.J. May (@bjmay) September 17, 2018
In a thread posted to Twitter, BJ May described a system he’d set up where his Nest video doorbell used the service IFTTT to get Google Assistant to lock his front door when it noticed a face it didn’t recognise. Unfortunately, it decided to scan the Batman face instead of his own, prompting the door to lock. Because the reverse is not possible (Google Assistant doesn’t have the power to unlock the door, which is a pretty wise security precaution), May used the pin required by the lock to open the door.
While it might seem a little bit easier to just have a key, May said on Twitter that using a lock controlled by an app allows his kids to get in and out of the house without having to worry about possibly losing their keys, which does kinda make sense. Just make a habit of wearing plain shirts, I guess.
