My house is pretty tricked out.. Lights, Echoes, Home Assistant. All the bells and whistles for a proper Smart Home are in place. This is great for me, who does a majority all of the programming for it but often it is a bit intimidating for guests who at a minimum don’t know the proper keywords for various lights.. Is it Bedroom lamp or Bedroom light? Honestly, I forget sometimes too! Well, now you can just tell your Echo in the bedroom, Alexa, Turn on the lights and it will turn on any lights associated with that particular Echo. (Be sure to use the Mobile app for configuration.) So yeah, that means it’s gonna make a lot of sense to have Echo Dots in all the rooms now!

I think this is a pretty huge advance in terms of context aware Voice control. With enough devices spread around the house, guests should be able to speak very naturally to your smart home and have it react accordingly and in a way that makes sense to them. Thankfully they also included the often neglected Tap in this context aware scenario (which is ironic since the tap is portable!).

For those of you not running Home Assistant, Amazon also released a feature called Routines. This will allow regular users to set up pretty complex routines within the Alexa App. Say this and then do that, that and that. Pretty powerful stuff in terms of automation for the general public. No fancy programming necessary.

If you haven’t jump on the Amazon Alexa train yet, now might be the perfect time!