Amazon took to its developer blog today to announce that Alexa, its very successful smart home speaker, will be supporting scenes. These will allow users to speak simple commands to set predefined conditions on various connected devices. Prior to this announcement, interaction with them was limited to specific manufacturer apps.

Scenes contrast from the already present groups feature, even though both allow control over multiple devices via one command. The difference is that scenes can set anything configured in them to a desired state, whereas groups only permit on/off statuses.

The blog post goes on to describe, in more detail, how this will work. A pretty good example is included, too, so read through it if you're curious. Overall, this sounds pretty neat and makes me consider getting my own Alexa. It seems that every time it pops up in news, it is adding some cool new thing.