Re: Not as bad as it sounds
"It won't do things automatically."
Indeed, but far from not being as bad as it sounds, that actually makes it even worse. There are already a whole bunch of different ways you can tell things what to do - every phone has at least one voice assistant whether you want it or not, Amazon and Google, among others, are trying to fill our homes with listening devices, people forget that both the Xbox1 and before that Kinect were both initially advertised as constantly spying on you (and that actually brought complaints at the time rather than everyone now paying extra for a device that does nothing else), and of course there are plenty of smaller niche solutions to mess with lights, heating, and so on.
Having yet another different solution that only works when you're near one specific piece of furniture and can only interact with a few specific devices is completely worthless. At least a sofa that does something automatically when you sit on it would have a unique selling point. A sofa that essentially just has a half-arsed Alexa taped to the side is pointless, since you could achieve a better experience by literally taping Alexa to the side. Even if you're concerned with fashion, you could still buy a Nattuzi sofa and hide your Echo behind a cushion on something. An automated sofa has rather limited use, but what they're actually selling appears to have no use at all.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
