As we close out 2019 and the decade, Twilight Solutions would like to wish everyone a happy, healthy holiday season. For clients and prospects, partners and suppliers, and everyone with whom we work across the San Francisco Bay Area, we thank you for your business and support.

As we are a home technology and automation company, we couldn't let this opportunity pass without a couple of tips for using technology to make the holidays just a little more comfortable and more fun. From voice control to lighting, read on for some practical ways to breeze through all the entertaining and hosting of the season.

The History of Voice Control

They say that life imitates art. In the 1960s, shows like Star Trek envisioned an era of smarter computers, intergalactic space travel, and the personal communicator - like our smartphones. That decade also saw the debut of Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction classic “2001: A Space Odyssey," featuring HAL, the talking computer. Fast forwarding half a century later, we now see that HAL predicted the future of today's voice assistants: Siri, Alexa, and Google. Did you know that the name HAL was a play on the initials IBM, the predominant computing company of that era? Did you know that IBM also pioneered the first speech recognition machine in 1962? Perhaps that’s why Arthur C. Clarke named it HAL. While HAL turned out to be a bit of a control freak, fortunately, today's voice assistants are here to do our bidding.

In the past four years since the introduction of the Amazon Echo smart speaker and Alexa, voice control technology and adoption has raced ahead at an astounding pace. The integration of your life in digital form onto computers, smartphones, and the cloud has allowed these voice assistants to become digital butlers. Through voice commands, you can ask about your package deliveries, an update on your schedule for the day, basic math questions, if a flight is on time, call an Uber - and much more.

Since Twilight Solutions is a smart home integration company in the heart of Silicon Valley, naturally, we have an interest in voice control for smart home automation. A host of intelligent devices have been introduced or integrated for smart home control with the leading voice assistant ecosystems from Amazon, Google, and Apple. There is also one more that was recently introduced - Josh.AI - that is specifically designed for smart home control. What are the differences? Read on to learn more.