Hello, I thought I’d give you an update into my adventures in the Amazon Echo and home automation. I’m still really enjoying my virtual assistant. Since my last post I’ve added a few more items to my home automation setup. My home now includes two Philips Hue Bloom lights, a Philips Hue Go (thank you, employer, for your rewards program 😀 ) a Harmony hub and a second Amazon Echo Dot for our bedroom. My husband prefers more tried and true methods of controlling our home, but even he has occasionally tried having Alexa control stuff. It certainly amuses him when Alexa doesn’t quite… perform as expected shall we say. The part of my home automation setup I love the most is my Philips Hue lights. Being able to play around with them is awesome and they can make such a difference to my room. I think I’ve just about resolved my issue with being able to set scenes with Alexa – you do need to be quite particular with the syntax you use unfortunately. Once I got that down it was much easier. The addition of the Harmony hub made combining routines much easier. Now I can say Alexa,…
Hello all. For something a little different today, I thought I’d share with you my first impressions of the Amazon Echo Dot and its pairing with the Philips Hue lighting system. I’ve been thinking about a an intelligent speaker for a while. I regularly use Apple’s Siri on my iPhone to set alarms, timers etc and I was interested in having an always-on assistant in the home. At the time of writing, there are three contenders in this market; the Amazon Echo, Google Home and the new Apple HomePod. I was anxiously watching the Apple Keynote to see what kind of product Apple would announce. While the HomePod looks interesting, its price was beyond my budget and also the emphasis seems to be on the Bluetooth speaker rather than the smart assistant integration. The ability to play my Apple Music would have been nice though. The Google Home was also of interest, but the Amazon Echo’s ability to play Audible audiobooks as well as the low price point of the Echo Dot were the deciding factors for me. Our apartment is pretty small, and I only play music with a headset, so I couldn’t justify the extra expense for…