Author: Josh Hendrickson / Source: How-To Geek
Waking up can be hard, but Alexa can make it easier. Alexa won’t make you any less sleepy or drag you out of bed, but it can make your morning routine much more efficient.
Routines For Weather, Traffic, Lights, and Snoozing
If you’re like a lot of people, you wake up (eventually), try to catch some news, check your email, get dressed, figure out weather and traffic conditions, and get coffee (maybe even breakfast!
) before leaving for work. It’s a lot to get done, and it probably doesn’t help that you hit the snooze button three or four times—even though you swore yesterday was the last time you would ever do that again.What if you could at least make your mornings more productive? Instead of having to pull out your phone to check news, then weather, and then traffic, you could have a routine take care of all of that. If you have smarthome tech, you could even consider rolling in routines to bring up the lights, turn on the coffee maker, and warm up (or cool down) the house. With a few delayed routines, you can even bring up lights slowly, like a sunrise clock.
If you want to take things a step further, you could add Echo buttons to your routines and give you a physical object to slap that will snooze Alexa, like alarm clocks of old. We’ll show you how to put together some morning routines to make getting out of bed more bearable—or at least save yourself some time in the morning.
Putting the Routine Together
Creating morning routines will follow similar steps to any other routines you’ve created. Open the Alexa app, and then tap the hamburger menu.
Tap “Routines.”
Tap the Plus (+) button in the upper right-hand corner to create a new routine.
Tap on the plus symbol to the right of “When this happens.”
Tap “Schedule.”
Tap “Select” to the right of “At Time.”
Choose your desired starting time. In this case, even though we want to wake up fully at 6:30 a.m., we’re going to choose 6:00 so we can bring up the lights slowly. Tap “Select” to the right of “Repeat.”
Pick the days you want the routine to fire. If you work Monday to Friday, you can select Weekdays. Then tap “Done.”
Tap “Next” in the upper right-hand corner.
Tap the plus symbol to the right of “Add action.”
Tap “Smart Home” to control smarthome devices. We’ll be demonstrating how to turn on smart lights like Philips Hue or LIFX bulbs.
Tap “Control Device” to turn on a single light bulb or tap “Control Group” to turn on a group of lights you’ve set up in your bedroom.
Tap the name of the smart light or group you want to turn on.
Tap “Brightness” and lower the slider to 5%. This turns on your light at 5% brightness at first, and we’ll gradually increase its brightness from there. Then tap “Next” in the upper right-hand corner.
Tap “Add Action.”
Tap “Wait.”
Change the duration to six minutes then tap “Next.” Alexa will wait this many minutes before executing the next action you configure.
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