It's been nearly a decade since the smart home introduced voice commands. Today, there are thousands of smart home devices, apps, services, skills and ways to add the internet to every inch of your home. In 2021, we saw small but significant updates to the smart home that set the stage for a big 2022. Here's what the next year in smart home tech could bring. Every year, we look forward to new products from major smart home brands and exciting new ideas from startups, too.

We're all spending a lot more time at home and starting to notice the things that annoy us: the way that one tap drips after using, or noting down the interior changes we're going to make once the lockdown is over. Protecting your home is just as important as decorating it and London start-up Hero Labs has a new smart home insurance product, called Hiro, that aims to do just that. Instead of telling customers to buy certain smart home devices to bring down the cost of insurance, they will instead be rewarded with discounts for the tech they already have in their homes. If you have smart home tech such as cameras, video doorbells or detect leakers, which help to prevent some of the most common causes of damage to homes and flats, then you will be able to benefit from cheaper insurance premiums, up to 25 per cent in some cases. Hero Labs launched its own smart leak detector at the end of last year which uses ultrasonic tech to monitor water use and AI algorithms to spot if anything unusual happens. For those who don't already own smart home tech, they will be able to buy different gadgets and devices at a cheaper price via the marketplace in the Hiro app.

You can't keep the big tech companies out of the news, can you? Smart home devices is one of the niches where they have been battling to gain supremacy -- Amazon's Echo, Google Home or Apple HomePod are all popular smart home devices. Despite the involvement of these tech giants among other major players, Smart home tech adoption has been slow so far. In my opinion, one of the biggest hindrances in this regard has been the privacy concerns emanating from the use of such smart home technology, like smart speakers. Amazon, Google & Apple -- all three have been previously embroiled in controversies where they were involved in privacy breach of the customers using their devices.

If you're in the market for a new tech product and find AI-powered gadgets fascinating, the Google Clips camera could be for you. It's a video camera, but the product doesn't have a built-in mic for recording sound, and it shoots footage at 15 frames per second. That rate is advantageous for saving material that doesn't take up too much space. Also, you can export single frames from videos to turn them into pictures. The standout characteristic of the two-inch-square Clips camera is it offers always-on, artificial intelligence (AI) technology that activates when it sees a scene that seems interesting.

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. Our picks and opinions are independent from any business incentives. I'm not ashamed to admit it--I love smart home tech. It has the potential to drastically improve our homes, and how we live in them. Just imagine what your home could do for you if your thermostat could talk to your phone, or your security camera could talk to your lights.