Amazon’s digital assistant can now control some of your smart devices for you – without any call required. But before you start dreaming about a day when Alexa will have your coffee ready for you in the morning and your car is already warming up in the garage for your commute, you need to know that her powers are slightly curtailed in this first thing.
Set up ‘Hunches’ in your Alexa application to get started (iOS, Android). Pull up the app, tap More tap in the lower right corner Institutions, and scroll down a bit. Tap on Hunches when you see it, a screen will be drawn that looks like this:
Tap on “Set up automatic actions” and you get a small list of possible actions Alexa can do on your behalf. I mainly have smart lights around my house, so I have two to choose from:
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When you select an action, you get a short video that tells you more about Alexa’s autoresponder. You can also tap on “Read more” to get an idea of what parameters Alexa can cause to act on her behalf. For example:
Tap when you are ready to turn on Alexa’s automatic preset Following. In my case, I then have to choose which lights I want Alexa to control, but that’s it. My “hump” is then set up, and I can go back to the Hunches section of my Alexa app to see when Alexa will activate one.
To remove a premonition, simply click on the raticon in the upper right corner of the Hunches screen. Search the “Automatic actions” section, tap on any smart device you see, and you can enable or disable an available automatic action:
Alexa’s automatic actions currently only work for a subset of smart devices, including lights, thermostats, doors and switches.
Once you are done with the feelings for this, you should also visit the brand new Alexa “Energy Dashboard” function to see how much juice your smart devices use during the day.
To access it, simply tap Devices at the bottom of your app and then tap on the Energy Dashboard box to top. Once you have read a bit about how it works and type Browse devices to continue. This, however, is as far as I have come; either the feature is still not introduced to me, or I need to customize something with my connected lights so Alexa knows how to add it to a dashboard.
It will be a fun feature to play with though. While it may not be as accurate as, for example, the energy readings you can get from a smart switch itself, it will at least provide a decent way to see if your devices are using more energy than you want. No one enjoys the monthly energy bill with pandemic.