As the “internet of things” produces more functional products for everyday use, smart devices are becoming increasingly common fixtures in the home. These learning-enabled tools offer benefits, from convenience to safety to cost-saving perks, and are quickly gaining popularity around the country.

“Technology has finally advanced enough … that we can analyze all of this data and truly start doing some of the artificial intelligence that will help you make your home smarter,” said Miles Kingston (pictured), general manager of the Smart Home Group at Intel. To help guide consumers through this new frontier of smart home tech, Intel has devoted a new department, the Smart Home Group, to building and managing smart household devices.

Kingston spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), co-hosts of theCUBE, during the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed the explosion of smart devices for consumers over the past few years and what Intel is doing in partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. to ensure efficient integrations. (* Disclosure below.)

From connected tech to smart homes

Though the monikers “connected” and “smart” are often used synonymously in conversations around home tech, Intel sees smart devices as the next step in the evolution from connected technology. Through the Smart Home Group, the company is working toward accelerating the transition into smart tech for homes.

“We spent years going into thousands of consumers homes … to truly understand some of the pain points that they were experiencing. We gave all this information to our architects and synthesized it into what areas we need to advance technology to enable some of these richer use cases,” Kingston said.

Currently, the work of advancing technology is focused primarily around the foundational building blocks of a smart home. Intel is working to ensure that these expansions are managed safely by focusing on what Kingston calls the four technology pillars: security, voice, vision and artificial intelligence.

“We’ve partnered with companies like McAfee on security software that will … manage all of the connected devices in your home as that extra layer of security,” he said.

By adhering with these pillars, Intel’s Smart Home Group is working to reimagine the smart home for its customers. “The reason we have focused on those technology pillars is we believe that by adding voice everywhere in the home, and the listening capability, as well as adding the vision capability, you’re going to enable all of this rich new data, which you have to have some of these AI tools to make any sense of,” Kingston said.

Looking ahead, Kingston sees even more functional capabilities for smart home devices. “I believe that in the future, those devices will be listening for anomalies like glass breaking, a dog barking, a baby crying, and I believe the hardware that we have today is very capable of doing that,” he said.

That future may not be too far off, according to Kingston. “We are probably about two years away from … truly being able to enable some smarter home use cases,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Intel sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Intel nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE