The Amazon Echo can do a lot more than play music and check the weather. As futuristically as you’d expect, it can actually control a wide range of smarthome products so that all your home comforts are just a voice command away. Read on as we show you how.
What You Need
You will—as you might expect—need an Amazon Echo (or any device that supports Alexa for that matter), as well as some compatible smarthome devices.
Other than that, you just need the Alexa app on your phone, which you probably already have downloaded. But if not, it’s available for iPhone and Android.
Prepare Your Smarthome Devices
Before you actually sit down to add smarthome devices to your Echo, we’d strongly recommend doing a little updating and housekeeping on the smarthome side of things. In our experience, Alexa takes a fairly literal approach to importing things and works best with updated software.
As such, we’d recommend first updating the firmware and companion software for the smarthome devices and hubs you intend to add to Alexa.
Next, go through your smarthome devices and make sure that all of the names, settings, labels, and so on are tweaked to your liking. For example, instead of a Philips Hue bulb named “Lamp 1”, you might consider changing it to “Bedside Lamp”. This makes it easier and more natural when giving Alexa commands to turn lights on and off, for instance.
How to Add Smarthome Devices to Alexa
Adding smarthomes devices to Alexa is easy (assuming you’re using a compatible device, of course).
To make your experience extra smooth, it’s important to understand how Alexa handles smarthome devices.First, you’ll add the devices to Alexa. Then, for ease of use, you can create groups within Alexa to bundle together certain devices—sometimes Alexa doesn’t import the existing groupings you already have in your smarthome systems, but instead imports each raw device separately.
For example, let’s say you have a group in your existing smarthome hub called “Bedroom”, and that group contains two light bulbs, a smart outlet, and a space heater. Let’s say you’ve set up a shortcut on the hub software called “Bedroom On” and everything turns on in the morning when you wake up. You can still use all those items with Alexa, but you’ll need to re-create your group within the Alexa app and call it “Bedroom” so that the “Bedroom On” command works with Alexa.
With that cleared up, let’s take a look how to do exactly what we just described.
Add Your Devices
With your smart home devices all updated and your naming schemes tidied up, open the Alexa app on your smartphone and tap the menu icon in the upper-left corner.
In the slide-out menu that appears, select “Smart Home”.
On this screen there are four sections: Groups, Devices, Scenes, and Smart Home Skills. Start off by tapping on “Devices”.
Before we can actually add smarthome…
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