26
Feb

Whole-home Control with Alexa

You’re probably familiar with Amazon’s Alexa – the virtual assistant built into Echo sensible speakers and smart displays. Although initially a DIY solution, Alexa has made her way into a number of third-party gadgets from TVs and thermostats, to fridges and lighting.

Today, we’ll look at precisely how you can remotely control other home appliances and devices using nothing but voice commands.

Why Use Alexa In Your Smart Home?

While using Alexa for fundamental search and streaming music is well and great, full potential is reached when you utilize it for whole-home automation. Alexa is a good way to get your smart home systems working together without an excessive cost, making your daily life much simpler. Voice control is not only convenient, its easy to use for all ages and abilities, minimizes touch on high-contact surfaces, and allows access to all systems from any room in the house. Best of all, never worry about losing the remote again!

How to Set Up Alexa in Your Smart Home

Unfortunately, it’s extremely hard here to create a detailed how-to guidebook because set-up can be device-specific. The good thing, though, is that the principle is super-simple.

Install the smart house device and hub, complete the installation procedure in-app, and you’re all set to connect devices to Alexa! This can be initiated in two ways:

  1. Say “Alexa, discover my products.”
  2. Go to the Smart Home segment of the app and click the “+” in the top right

With either option, Alexa scans your network in order to locate the devices in your home. How you name devices in-app will be how they’ll show up on the Alexa app; to save confusion it’s helpful to make sure all of your devices have unique names. This can be changed in the Wise House tab.

What if you want to elevate your smart home control by accessing multiple devices with one command? This can easily be done by creating a Smart Home Device Group. With these groups you can do things like raise shades, turn on lights, and play music all with one command.

To really take your voice control to the next level, you can import third-party Scenes from platforms like Savant. This will be done automatically during the network scan stage of set-up. Once imported and registered in the Alexa app, you can trigger these Scenes with the appropriate voice command.

Now you can make use of Alexa for a lot more than requesting a weather or traffic update. Still have questions about setting up your Alexa? Reach out and we can answer any additional questions!