Vivint Smart Assistant

One of the primary goals of the Vivint smart home system is to streamline people's lives and we assumed that automating people’s experiences would make significant progress toward fulfilling this goal for our customers.

The data science team at Vivint had a goal of detecting the occupancy state of the home—whether the home was empty or occupied, and whether people were sleeping or awake. The 3 key principles of automation and usability are observability, directability, and predictability. I explored solutions to convey the state of the system to the user so they could easily observe the state of the home, correct it if needed, and automate their devices based on those occupancy states.

Smart Comfort

The first application of the smart assistant was for the automating the thermostat based on occupancy state to conserve energy. Eventually, we planned for the state switching widget to be a global widget to manually or automatically control the entire home.

During our explorations, we relied and the concept of “levels of autonomy” (LOA)—a common framework in automation theory. However, I eventually abandoned that framework for more effective frameworks of autonomy.

Other interactions with Sky