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Exactly. The benefit of a "stack" involving a simple piece of metal that makes a connection cannot be underestimated.

An offline capable home automation system (including voice recognition) that can be managed by a non-technical person has a huge ongoing cost just in terms of keeping it working as it is, and that is before you change anything (if you can).

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My son won a Clapper in the family's white elephant gift exchange. We hooked it up to our Christmas tree lights, and, I gotta say, the thing is pretty great for that use case--no more reaching through pine needles to reach the plug.

And somehow it manages to do this without running TCP/IP stack. I'm working on a project in the IoT space right now, and a Clapper is making me feel kind of silly about it.

The one obvious Achilles heel of a clapper is that you’re limited to one action per acoustic space.

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