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What is a smart home? If you've always wanted to know, you've come to the right place! A smart home is a connected and smart home where devices communicate with you and with each other. The goal of a smart home is to make your life more comfortable, safe and energy efficient. The term smart home is closely associated with the term Internet of Things. You may have also heard the acronym IoT. Internet of Things means "Internet der Dinge" in German and describes the networking of various devices. The devices are connected via the WLAN in your home. This allows you to conveniently control your appliances, the lights or the heating of your home from anywhere via app, whether on the couch, on the way to work or in the office. Phew, quite a lot of terms at once.

First take a breath. But what does that mean in practice? To make it easier to understand what a smart home is, let's look at a few examples. Imagine lying down on the couch at night and watching your new favorite show. Crap, forgot to dim the light. In such situations, the light switch feels light years away. Get up again now, pretty annoying! In a smart home, that won't happen to you. You can easily dim the lights from your couch using the app.

This saves you unnecessary walks through your home and you have more time for your show. Another example. Quickly iron your shirt or blouse in the morning and then head straight out the door. Then, when you arrive at work, you ask yourself, "Did I actually turn off the iron?" The whole day you have a bad feeling and would like to go home for a short time. In a smart home, you can control your iron via app and check if it's still on right at work. If it's on, you can simply turn it off via the app. You don't need a special iron for this, all you need is a smart adapter plug on your wall socket. You can switch the power off and on via the adapter plug.

This not only saves nerves, but also increases the security of your home and provides a peace of mind. With a smart home, you always have your home in sight and everything under control in a relaxed way. But smart homes usually have one big problem: compatibility among the many different devices. There is a separate app from each manufacturer and the cooperation of the devices often only works if they are from the same manufacturer. This is exactly where Magenta SmartHome from Telekom comes in, with the Magenta SmartHome app.

The app helps you bring together many different products from different manufacturers. This way you have the possibility to arrange your home according to your ideas and with your favorite smart products. You can also create so-called rules and scenes with the Magenta SmartHome app. Scenes and rules allow you to freely combine your smart devices. Let's take another look at our examples together with the Magenta SmartHome app. You could easily dim the lights via voice command, either right in the app or through a smart speaker: "Dim the lights in the living room to 50%." Pretty handy.

How about having the iron or unnecessary power guzzlers turn off automatically when you leave your home? Sounds good, right? With the help of a GPS tracker, you can create a rule in the Magenta SmartHome app that does exactly that. As soon as you leave your home, any number of devices are switched off. Automatically, without you having to do anything. This saves energy and provides a feeling of security. These are just a few of many examples of how you can combine your devices through the Magenta SmartHome app. We hope you enjoyed the video and it helps you to understand the basics of a smart home better. If you want to learn more about smart homes and Telekom's solution, take a look at www.smarthome.de..