Last year at Amazon’s surprise event, Amazon announced a new feature heading towards their Echo devices called Alexa Guard.

This feature essentially makes your Echo into a home-security device. It will listen for discernible noises such as smashing glass or smoke alarms, and then send alerts to your phone. From there you will be able to listen to audio clips of the triggering event, and even tap into a video feed if you have an Echo Show.

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This feature has been in beta-testing for the past year, but is now available to all Echo owners in the US. You just need to enable it in the Settings portion of your Alexa app.

There are three components to Alexa Guard; Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm, Breaking Glass, and Away Lighting.

Away Lighting is interesting because it will periodically turn on your connected lights to make it seem like you are home, using both machine learning and your location to turn on the appropriate lights at appropriate times.

The only downside to Alexa Guard is that you must manually enable it by setting Alexa to “away” mode. You can either do this by telling Alexa “I’m leaving” when leaving your home, or you can do it within the app on your phone. Additionally you must say “Alexa, I’m home” in order to disable the Guard mode.

Hopefully we will receive an update to automate this process in the future, and be able to incorporate it in our routines.