The Amazon assistant can now turn on your robot vacuum cleaner or turn on your smart lights on its own. Yes, you heard that right.
Amazon announced last September that it will soon roll out an update that will enable Alexa to respond to the feelings it had about the way your paired devices behave in your home – to turn off a smart light bulb in a room long after you go to bed, for example. Normally, Hunches works by allowing Alexa to suggest only solutions to these detected problems. But now Alexa users can choose that the smart assistant can only do the thing itself.
Hunches are enabled by default, though Alexa goes through how to disable the feature after explaining your first Hunch. To access your Hunches preferences, open the Alexa app and select the “more” option from the menu at the bottom of the screen. Choose institutions, scroll down and click on Hunches.
This was especially interesting for me, the owner of an affiliated coffee maker. Sure, I thought, if it had the potential to go horribly wrong, Alexa would start sneakily and start brewing my next morning’s coffee in the middle of the night – only to slowly deplete my stock of coffee grounds.
But as of today, the function is limited to smart locks, lights, plugs and thermostats. However, if you have another paired device, the spokesperson said that users “can start receiving Hunches from Alexa based on how you normally use your paired devices.”
For now, it seems like my coffee is safe. So help me as this bot slowly starts scratching away at what is left of my common sense.
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