“What I Tell You Three Times Is True”: The S.N.A.R.K. Circuit

So-called natural interaction with smart homes has been limited by a misunderstanding of how humans naturally interact. Consider speech. Chatbots, developed to push the limits of voice-based interaction ignore the fact that natural human speech is actually multi-modal, supplemented both consciously and unconsciously by posture, gesture, facial expression, and a complex web of flexible situational data. In terms of UX design, this is not a bug but a feature. The inability of voice-based systems to recognize spoken commands can be corrected by using additional natural signals such as gestures, to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. This form of modular redundancy was fundamental to early satellite communications and became the basis for our S.N.A.R.K. Circuit, the means by which a human with the correct mental model can interact intuitively with a Smart Home.