Amazon’s assistant can now turn on his robot vacuum or turn off his smart lights on his own. Yes, you heard me right.
Amazon announced last September, which would soon be releasing an update that would allow Alexa to act on the guesses it had about how its connected devices are behaving in your home – turning off a smart lamp in a room long after you sleep, for example. Typically, Hunches works by allowing Alexa to only suggest solutions for these detected problems. But now, Alexa users can choose to allow the smart assistant to do things themselves.
Guesses are enabled by default, although Alexa will explain how to disable the feature after explaining your first guess. To access your Hunches preferences, open the Alexa app and select the “more” option in the menu at the bottom of the screen. Select settings, scroll down and click Guesses.
This was especially interesting for me, the owner of a connected coffee maker. Certainly, I thought, this has the potential to go terribly wrong if Alexa becomes dishonest and starts preparing my next morning coffee in the middle of the night – slowly running out of my coffee grounds.
But as of today, the feature is limited to smart locks, lights, plugs and thermostats. If you have another device connected, however, the spokesman said that users “can start receiving Hunches from Alexa based on how you normally use your connected devices”.
For now, it seems, my coffee is safe. So help me if this bot slowly starts to reduce what’s left of my sanity.
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