What is the Internet of Things (IoT)?

- In a house, we have a smart speaker, well, several, in fact. We tell the smart speaker to turn on and off the lights. We tell it to play music. Ask it information about the weather and traffic conditions and what a whale sounds like. The smart speaker connects to a cloud service that processes all our questions and commands and learns from them. The cloud service connects to my TV and my phone and my laptop and our security cameras and our robot vacuum and (suctioning vacuum) and myriad of other things in our house and every time we interact with any one of these things, a small piece of data is collected about our behavior to be used to improve our interactions and make our life simpler or at least that's the idea. These connected devices make up what we call the internet of things, quite literally things or objects in the real world connected to the internet in a way that augments not only their behavior, but the behavior of other things. So when I sit down to read a book on my…