Amazon’s digital assistant can now control some of your smart devices for you – without any required prompts. But before you start dreaming about the day when Alexa will have your coffee ready for you in the morning and your car already warming up in the garage for your ride, know that your powers have been slightly reduced on that first lap.
To begin, set up “Hunches” in your Alexa application (iOS, Android) Open the application, tap More in the bottom right corner, touch settingsand scroll down a little bit. Touch Guesses when you see it, which will open a screen similar to this:
Touch “Set up automatic actions,” and you’ll get a short list of potential actions that Alexa can take on your behalf. Mostly, I have smart lights around my house, so I have two amazing ones to choose from:
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When selecting an action, you will get a short video that tells a little more about Alexa’s automatic response. You can also tap on “Learn more” to get an idea of what parameters can cause Alexa to perform its actions on your behalf. For example:
If you’re ready to activate Alexa’s automatic guess, tap Next. In my case, I have to choose which lights I want Alexa to control, but that’s it. My “guess” is then set up and I can go back to the Guesses part of my Alexa app to check when Alexa will fire one.
To remove a guess, simply click on the gear icon in the upper right corner of the Guesses screen. Look for the “Automatic actions” section, touch any smart device you see, and you can enable or disable an available automatic action:
Alexa’s automatic actions only work for a subset of smart devices at the moment, including lights, thermostats, doors and switches.
Once you’re done playing with them, you should also check out the new “Energy Panel” feature to see how much juice your smart devices use throughout the day.
To access it, just tap Devices at the bottom of your app and then tap the Power panel box towards the top. After reading a little bit about how it works and playing Browse devices to continue. However, that is all I have achieved; either the feature has not yet been implemented for me, or I need to adjust something with my lights on so Alexa knows how to add them to a panel.
Still, it will be a fun resource to play with. While not as accurate as, say, the power readings you can get from a smart switch, it will at least provide a decent way to see if your devices are using more power than you would like. Nobody enjoys this monthly energy bill fueled by a pandemic.