Controlling Your Smart Home with Amazon Alexa
Learn how to use the Alexa personal assistant to control smart home devices via Amazon’s Echo and Echo Dot devices.
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This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
All the smart home systems and hubs come with their own smartphone apps to control their various smart devices. And, as described in Chapter 10, “Controlling Your Home with Apple Home,” there’s Apple HomeKit, which lets you control systems from multiple companies from the unified Home app. All of these apps attempt to simplify the operation of what is essentially a set of complex technologies.
But if you really want to make your smart home easy to control, there’s nothing easier than using voice commands. That’s where Amazon comes in, via its Echo and Echo Dot devices and Alexa personal digital assistant. The Echo/Dot devices connect to all (or most) of your smart hubs and devices via your home’s wireless Wi-Fi network, and then you can control those devices via simple voice commands. Just tell Alexa what you want to do, and it controls the devices to do it.
It’s far and away the easiest way to control your smart home. (And there’s more beyond that, too!)
Understanding Alexa—and Echo
In spite of the name and the voice, Alexa isn’t a person. No, Alexa is just a piece of software, a kind of intelligent digital assistant that interacts with you using voice commands. That is, you talk to Alexa and she (or is it an it?) talks back. There are no keyboards to type or touchscreen to touch; it’s all done vocally.
What Alexa Does and How Alexa Works
In many ways, Alexa is similar to Siri on an Apple iPhone or Cortana in Windows 10. You ask Alexa a question or issue a command, and Alexa answers your question or does what you’ve asked it to do. You speak, Alexa listens. Alexa “speaks,” and you get whatever it is you’ve asked for.
What can you use Alexa to do? Well, you can have Alexa find current information (weather forecast, news headlines, sports scores), find interesting and useful facts, calculate math problems, and retrieve recipes. You can also use Alexa to play music, add items to your calendar or to-do list, and order items online. And, more pertinent to our current interests, you can use Alexa to control various smart devices in your smart home.
For Alexa to do all that she does, she has to connect to the Internet. That’s where she gets all the answers to your factual queries, from various news sites, Wikipedia, and the like. When you ask a question, Alexa essentially does an Internet search and comes back with the closest answer, which she then reads to you. It’s a little unnerving if you’ve never dealt with artificial intelligence; close your eyes, and it’s as if you’re talking to a human servant instead of a digital one. (In fact, it’s easy to drift into a conversational mode with Alexa, which doesn’t really work that well.)
Using Alexa as a Smart Home Controller
In addition to connecting to the Internet to find pertinent information, Alexa can also connect to various smart devices in your home. When your smart hub has discovered your Echo device, you can then use Alexa to control those connected devices, using similar voice commands.
Just say “Alexa, turn off the living room lights” and, assuming you have everything set up correctly, the lights will turn off. It’s a lot easier than using a smartphone app—or turning off your lights by hand!
