My wife is nearly home. System alerts me. I quickly tidy my day's mess. She doesn't need that after a big day.

She arrives. Gate opens for her automatically.

As she approaches the door, the light turns on for her.

Her night time play lists starts on low volume, overriding mine.

A leopard approaches the house. The house robot with bolt on subscriptions, (the expensive "hunt and defend" add on), wreaks carnage on said leopard, only to find it was a child trick or treating. Lawyers for subscription bot are arranging payment to child's family for their lost family member.

All in all, it's really useful.

Unpopular opinion: home automation is overblown. Except for the disabled or edge cases the convenience these solutions add are comparable to the inconvenience they bring (added expensive, harder to maintain, repair, replace, etc).

I'll get out of bed to turn off the lights.

You can read measurements without going to the device itself, instead, you use a phone or similar. This also means that a device doesn't require a display. Consider an outside thermometer as example. Home automation allows you to draw a little graph giving you a good idea how cold it got. Let's add another measurement device, say a radon meter. Again, no display needed and you could stick it somewhere less accessible.

You can make home automation as silly or useful as you want it to be.

So many reasons.

Smart locks on doors that disarm house alarms when they're unlocked with a code. Lights that turn on when someone is in a room, and off when the room is empty. The garage door alerting you that it's still open around the time you go to bed. The house stereo turning itself off at a certain time on weeknights, and the house alarm system turning itself on at the same time. Being able to check that the gas fireplace is off after you've driven out of your neighborhood on your way somewhere. The house disabling the security system for 20 minutes when it detects you on the second floor landing, so that you don't trip the motion sensors when you go down for a snack.

A non-trivial example of some more complex things our house does: when one of our phones enters the neighborhood, and it is after dark, our carriage and porch lights come on. If no other phones are already home, some of the inside lights also turn on. When we turn onto our street, the garage door opens. After the garage door is closed, the outside lights turn off.

Any number of things ranging from small to large conveniences. Some small conveniences become large ones when you have guests staying over.

Edit: ooo, ooo, one other thing: I have a bunch of these switches around the house that have multiple buttons and are programmable (they recognize single click, double click, hold, etc). It allows me to hook almost any part of my house to any switch, without rewiring everything. I have several configured to turn off the alarm system, I can manually turn off all of the first-floor lights from the upstairs master, I have one in the entryway set to toggle a lamp in the office to avoid having to walk in there, navigate around the desk to the far side of the room, and switch it from there. I configured one to turn the gas fireplace on and off, because the builders had not seen fit to wire the controls to a wall-switch.

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In addition to all the automation everyone has talked about, some of us are also data nerds.

I enjoy knowing the temp, air quality, etc. in every room. How does this change throughout the day/season? Did leaving this door open or this fan on improve anything? What can I automate at what threshold to improve things?

You can also get a lot of data about energy usage too. And if you have solar and battery, it's neat seeing how much it affects and how much you save.

Automation is useful, but in the end it's just a hobby like many other things. It's fine to be into it or not into it.

Only when you have it working you truly realise how cool it is that things can now happen on their own, AND because you wanted them to. Like, I have some stair lights turn on when someone passes by, BUT only when the Sun angle is low enough. So it magically happens earlier in winter, and later in summer. BUT it's even better, because when it's after 22:30, the turn-on automation is deactivated as to avoid the dogs flashing the lights on while we sleep. It's like magic and you can tailor things for your workflow.

As others said, fun and convenience.

For example: when I start a movie, the lights in my living room dim or turn off automatically. Sure, I could get up and do and set several lights manually, but I would probably not bother and watch a movie in a lit room. When I stop or pause the movie, lights go back to the normal setting.

If it’s dark when I get home and I open the front door, it starts the default lighting program. Sure I could fumble for the light switches in the dark, but it’s another convenience.

I have only some smart lights, a Philips Hue system, and only use limited automation, but for me it is brilliant.

I live in Sweden so during the winters we have to wake up hours before the sunrise, waking up in darkness is dificult for me, so I have set up my Hue system to act as part of my alarm clock.

At 05:00 my alarm goes off, just before that my smart lights in my bedroom and hallway slowly turned on, so my eyes are already adjusted to the light, this also means that I am more alert and ready to get up. A few hours later the lights turn off.

During weekends the I don't have an alarm, and the lights turn on at 07:00, meaning I wake up slowly to a lit room.

I have been thinking of adding automation for the lights for when I come home after work, but so far I am happy enough with manually turning on the lights just outside the door.

The most useful automations I personally have are rules to control the AC. It basically only kicks in if it's too hot or too cold, and I set it to turn off if I leave the house or at night. Basically saves money, and removes the need to use the remote control.

There's more stuff I'd like to do (like controlling lights and house fans), but that's definitely less urgent to me.

For a lot of people it’s just a hobby and they use their home as a digital playground.

Having my lights turn off from a voice control is really useful when I want to take a nap but I found that it was weird having all this shit tied into a strangers cloud (google, amazon, apple, whatever). If its hosted at home its usually just fine. As long as ET doesn't phone home.

I'm using home assistant with thermostats and humidity/temperature sensors mostly to get information how the house heats and how the rooms are affected by humidity and temperature changes.

I also automated two dehumidifiers with those sensors and zigbee plugs to not run 24/7 but in defined windows when the noise isn't bothering anyone and if the humidity triggers certain thresholds. The automation also has hysteresis sesstongs so the devices do not constantly turn on and off.

In general I don't automate to a point where I can just flick a switch or turn on something manually. But it is nice to be able to control and see everything.

It is fun to do.

But for practical reasons the biggest thing for me has been easily connecting switches together.

For example my kitchen has two big lights. Each light has its own switch but they put the switches in the opposite side of the room, so if you want both on you need to turn on one walk across the kitchen to turn on the other and do the same thing to turn them off.

With automation/IOT I can now logically connect the switches together so turning on one switch will turn on the other.