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In our home the Echo devices are used throughout the day for home control tasks. "Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights", "Alexa, close the east garage door", "Ale
by luma 9y ago
In our home the Echo devices are used throughout the day for home control tasks. "Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights", "Alexa, close the east garage door", "Alexa, is the front door locked?" etc. The kitchen Echo sees a lot of action around dinner time for things like timers ("Alexa, set a timer for 15 minutes"), conversions ("Alexa, how many cups in a quart"), and grocery lists. The hands-free nature of these interactions are particularly helpful when you may have your hands full while preparing a meal.
I have a fair amount of home automation kit deployed which I find fun to monkey around with but the rest of the family never really cared to interact with until the Echo came into play.
- Topolomancer 9y agoThese are good scenarios, thank you. I still have some reluctance because I am not sure how dependent Alexa (or the home automation system, for that manner) is on services that are outside my control. I recall that a lot of these products went belly up, leaving their customers stranded.
- luma 9y agoI strongly recommend checking out Home Assistant, which is fully self-hosted and open-source. The Alexa integration requires the cloud (because that's where Alexa lives), but nearly everything else my system does is under my roof and under my control.