Lucy is a giant wall tablet that controls the smart home

Multiple companies have now sought to make smart home interaction intuitive through the use of tablets. A dedicated tablet allows anyone to quickly hop on and control whatever needs to be controlled, the thinking goes, thus eliminating the need to fumble through different smartphone apps or other possibly confusing controls. Efforts like the Amazon Echo have better captured users' imagination, but a Germany startup called Lucy thinks it has a solution that combines the best of both worlds, and it's currently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter.

Lucy is effectively a giant tablet that hangs on the wall. Buyers can pick between display sizes of 17, 24 or 27in. The 17in screen starts at about $400, which the company says is 35 percent of the retail price. Like many other smart home hubs these days, users can converse with Lucy, asking questions and getting reminders about upcoming events in the calendar or about medications. The large touchscreen display gives users another convenient way to both see information and interact with their smart home. Lucy also includes an HD camera and the increasingly common feature of facial recognition, allowing Lucy to distinguish between different members of a family. This is useful when users are trying to get information specific to themselves or change settings of some part of the home to fit their preferences.

Whether the Lucy concept catches on might have a lot to do with decor. People might wonder how well something like Lucy fits into their homes and what the advantage is to using Lucy over something like a smart TV, which Samsung wants to make the center of a smart home. A TV is not a dedicated device, but many homes these days have more than one TV, as well. Users also likely want multiple ways of interacting with smart home products. Smart home apps work best when someone is away from home or perhaps just being lazy in bed. Something like Lucy or a TV would make better sense when someone just gets home from work or school, though. The smart home hasn't even gone mainstream yet, but complexity is growing and device makers need to account for it.