From Rights to Rites: Expectations Management in Smart-Home AI
Authors: Varad Vishwarupe, Ivan Flechais, Marina Jirotka, Nigel Shadbolt
Abstract
Domestic voice assistants and smart-home devices are increasingly embedded in everyday routines, yet their ethics are often treated as an afterthought or delegated to compliance teams. To explore how expectations about smart-home AI are constructed and managed, we conducted 33 semi-structured interviews with designers, developers, and researchers from major smart-home platforms (Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Azure IoT, and Google Nest). Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, we develop Expectations Management (EM): a culturally embedded model describing how practitioners shape, calibrate, and repair expectations by balancing organisational rights with culturally situated rites. We show that EM differs from expectation-confirmation theory and trust-calibration by foregrounding moral judgement, situated action, and cross-cultural variation. Our analysis reveals four recurring design tensions: automation vs. autonomy, helpfulness vs. intrusiveness, personalisation vs. predictability, and transparency vs. obscurity and distils them into a five-phase EM Design Playbook that supports moral prudence. We discuss implications for responsible smart-home design and offer guidance for human-centred AI.
Smart homes are evolving toward complex state-dependent living environments, requiring Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason over user intent, preferences, and multi-device interactions. However, existing smart-home benchmarks often focus on static instruction-to-API mapping or limited simulations, failing to evaluate whether LLMs can reason, interact, and act reliably in realistic household scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce SMH-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLMs in smart-home environments. Built upon HomeEnv, an executable and verifiable smart-home simulator, SMH-Bench contains 1,100 high-quality tasks spanning 7 categories and 22 fine-grained subcategories. It further stratifies tasks across simple, medium and complex homes, ranging from small apartments to dense multi-room environments with 135 devices. Experiments show that although frontier LLMs achieve strong performance on explicit control and query tasks, they still exhibit significant weaknesses in automation task scheduling, ambiguity handling and personalized reasoning, especially as home complexity increases. We hope SMH-Bench will facilitate the development of more reliable, context-aware, and practically deployable smart-home agents.
\texttt{Homebot} is a locally deployable AI agent for conversational household assistance and automation. It accepts voice and instant-messaging requests through a shared runtime that combines language-model responses with registered tools and task-specific skills. The design separates common request processing from session ownership: messaging history remains scoped to a channel and chat, whereas voice interaction is bounded by wake-word activation. For hands-free use, \texttt{Homebot} combines local wake-word detection, streaming speech recognition and synthesis, and an explicit dialogue-state protocol for ending, following up, or continuing a conversation. Clear channel, tool, and skill contracts support practical customization for household use.
Large language model agents are moving beyond text-only interaction toward physical-world control, with smart homes as a representative domain. Real domestic interaction requires understanding ambiguous intents, operating in dynamic environments, and performing multi-turn reasoning. However, existing methods struggle to generate high-quality training data for smart home agents. We propose HomeFlow, a verifiable data flywheel for this domain. HomeFlow uses HomeEnv as a unified simulation environment and HomeMaker to procedurally generate diverse home settings. Subsequently, Blueprint compiles open-ended user intents into executable state-based success conditions, while MCTS-Flow synthesizes diverse, verifiable multi-turn trajectories through environment-guided tree search. We then optimize the agents via supervised fine-tuning and step-wise RLVE, which facilitates iterative improvement through authentic physical feedback. We further construct SmartHome-Bench to evaluate the agent across various smart home tasks. On this benchmark, HomeFlow-RL-4B and HomeFlow-RL-8B achieve task success rates of 84.60% and 87.03%. It is worth noting that HomeFlow-RL-8B even surpasses the leading GPT-5.5 by 1.23 percentage points.