Smart home
The phrase smart home refers to a hodge-podge of technical automation involving voice recognition, smart lighting, keyless door entry, security cameras and systems, smart plugs, smart switches, smart thermostats, smart TV's and streaming devices, smart smoke detectors, smart (and robotic) vacuum cleaners, smart lawn watering systems, and many more. "Smart" in this case usually means wireless control and monitoring for devices that are either powered by the electrical grid, in which case they may use a wifi, or are powered by battery, in which case they may use a low-power wireless radio signal. These devices contain a small microprocessor as well as some kind of radio for communications, and collectively, smart devices in a home make up a portion of the comsumer Internet of Things (IoT).
Home Wi-Fi and a bluetooth-capable smartphone or tablet has always been a requirement for smart home technology.
Since there were no standards originally, by 2015 a jungle of competing methods for networking, control and monitoring had grown up. Consumers often had to buy special hubs specific to one vendor to use that vendor's products, and products were not often interoperable. Most vendors did make sure there products could be reached by smart speakers by Amazon, Google, Apple or Samsung, but consumers usually also need to open a different app on their smart phone or tablet in order to control devices by each manufacturer. This meant that a consumer would become "locked in" to one company, making it expensive and awkward to add similar devices from another company.
About ten years ago, industry consortiums formed to work on standards for smart home device communications, and their underlying wireless communications, which would make it possible for products from all vendors to work together seamlessly and provide fast performance, privacy, and security and would work even if there is not connection to the outside internet (i.e., no connection to "the cloud" or to servers). This resulted in a new standard, called Matter whose first version was finalized in Sept. 2022 and emerging in the marketplace during 2023. Most major vendors have committed to adhering to the basics of the emerging standard within a few years. Another important, emerging standard for smart home devices is Thread, which specifies how the wireless communications among smart home devices will work when using the Matter standard.