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A talking house by 2025?

SANTA CLARA/SINGAPORE — Imagine coming home to a voice welcoming you back the moment you open the door. It’s not a person or your dog barking. It’s your house welcoming you home.

A Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch is pictured after its launch during an event at the IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin, on Sept 4, 2013. Photo: REUTERS

A Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch is pictured after its launch during an event at the IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin, on Sept 4, 2013. Photo: REUTERS

SANTA CLARA/SINGAPORE — Imagine coming home to a voice welcoming you back the moment you open the door. It’s not a person or your dog barking. It’s your house welcoming you home.

Sounds strange? Yet, this is what more than 50 per cent of the people who took part in McAfee’s Future of Technology: 2025 survey believe will happen in 11 years.

The study examined the thoughts and attitudes of close to 8,000 consumers in 12 countries around the world, including US, UK, Japan and India.

Besides having a “talking house”, 68 per cent of the respondents in the survey believe that they’ll have a smart refrigerator that will automatically add items running low onto their grocery list. If this becomes reality, it means that you won’t be left with a few drops of milk when you need it most.

Other gadgets that are thought to become commonplace are “wearables”. Almost two-thirds (57 per cent) believe wearable devices will be commonly used, and, they’re likely to be connected to kitchen appliances.” So, grocery shopping could potentially be as easy as using your watch to retrieve that grocery list recorded by your fridge.

Many consumers also foresee such devices could save you a trip to the doctor’s by sending health vitals directly to your doctor. But, they stopped short on believing these gadgets would be able to do an online health check and diagnoses.

With continuous progression of technology and its pervasiveness in our lives, cybercrime and security are not lost on consumers. Financial loss, identity theft and fraud were cited as their biggest concerns, with 64 per cent expressing concern about what the state of cybersecurity will be like in 2025.

Mr David Freer, vice president of McAfee’s Asia Pacific consumer business, said: “Data security and privacy is a constant, if not increasing, concern among consumers as technology continues to evolve and accelerates interconnectivity between devices and platforms.”

Intel futurist Brian Johnson added: “People have just started to understand that their personal data is not some ethereal thing.

They haven’t quite figured out what’s appropriate for others to know about that data.”

To illustrate this point, Johnson said: “We don’t blurt out our credit card information when we walk into a room. Why would we want our data do that online?”

 

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