For a month, my house has been a smart home: this is how to live with Alexa as a roommate
Is turning your home into a smart home simple and cheap? Everyone has doubts about home at 2.0. In this report, we will see what we need to adapt a house to new technologies and that Alexa becomes the core of a network of connected devices that will make our lives easier.
The Smart Home has become one of the favorite topics in today’s technology. The specialized media are dotted with news related to smart homes, with speakers with virtual assistants and a wide range of connected devices to control our home remotely or with the voice. But is it so simple to turn our home into a smart home?
This is the question I have faced in recent weeks: if with three simple devices it would be easy to start creating a connected home. For this, I have chosen a small team of connected devices: a smart speaker, a light bulb and a plug connected to the Wi-Fi network.
With these three devices, it may seem that I will not get very far, but that is precisely the challenge: that with a very limited initial investment, the virtual assistant and the devices can offer me a wide variety of options to make my day easier. Then I will tell you about my experience.
The first step is to choose the virtual assistant that will become the center of the Smart Home. The big technology companies that offer this service are already starting to have a wide list of brands with which they collaborate to be compatible with the majority of devices that we can add to our house. According to the assistant we choose, we must adjust to those compatible devices.
In my case, I opted for Alexa, the virtual assistant of Amazon. The reason? Alexa has more than 10,000 skills and is one of the most compatible assistants in the market with third-party devices, so it may be the best choice to make it the core of our smart home.
However, despite its wide compatibility, we have encountered a series of inconveniences that we will discuss throughout this report. One of the compatibility problems I have found with the TV, or rather with the device that connects my TV with the internet. At home, I have a Google Chromecast that is not compatible with Alexa, so I could not ask him to put a Netflix movie or series on TV. To carry out this action, I had to opt for a FireTV Stick to replace my Chromecast, which would have meant an unexpected outlay.
What do we need? We start with a simple group of devices
Despite having chosen Alexa as an assistant, we have not opted for an Amazon family speaker. Instead of placing an Echo speaker as the center of our new smart home, we have chosen a speaker from the Energy Sistem company with Alexa inside.
In this way we have been able to verify that the choice of a different brand does not complicate the user experience, while we have Alexa compatible devices, everything will go on wheels.
The Energy Smart Speaker 5 Home is a tower of good size and simple design that must always be connected and is compatible with Alexa, Spotify Connect, Airplay and directly with the mobile phone via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It has a price of 80 euros on Amazon and we can use it with both Android phones and an iPhone and link it with some other speaker in the room to create a stereo sound.
With this simple team of three or four devices, we already have a good base to start experimenting with the different options that Alexa offers us, but first, we will see if it is easy to install everything.
Setting up our smart home will only take a few minutes
Now that we have all our devices, the next step is to configure our Smart Home. To do this, we must first install different applications of each brand on our mobile and configure the devices following the instructions they give us. Once this is done, we are ready to link Alexa with each of the selected devices.
Invest in an increasingly automated house
After almost a month with Alexa at home, the time comes for the truth, is it worth the investment? Yes, but with conditions.
The intelligent speakers in general already give enough games with a great variety of functions and devices that are created to make our house more automatic and Alexa is one of the best. This makes it worthwhile to invest some money and gradually build our connected ecosystem according to our needs and tastes.
They are also designed to make their use as simple as possible. It indeed takes some curiosity to find out all the possibilities that these systems offer and not keep the most basic functions. That is, to pay off the investment to the fullest you must devote some time and dive with the desire among all the options it offers.
But the key is to know what you want from your smart home, watch very carefully that all the devices you bring home are compatible with the assistant you have chosen to be the core and gradually expand that network of devices connected.
If you want a simple speaker with the assistant, or if you prefer to invest in a more powerful speaker to also have a good sound quality and listen to music or connect it to the television. These are some of the main questions you should ask yourself, before starting this process.
Some of the features offered may not interest you, you may never ask Alexa to tell you a joke, but I assure you that when you find those functions and routines that suit your tastes and your day today, it will be very difficult for you to go back and give up on them.