The smart home is official here. This holiday season, it has been reported the Amazon’s Echo Dot smart speaker and its built-in Alexa voice assistant dominated the sales charts. So following the Christmas holiday, Amazon announced the Echo Dot was the best-selling product of the holiday season on its website. The Alexa app also made its way to the number 1 spot on the App Store for the first time, and the Google Home app managed to sneak into the top ten. It’s easy to say, ‘Oh look, a lot of people got smart speakers this holiday season,” but this is an important milestone, as the smart home is finally upon us. If you are like the many people and got a smart home speaker this holiday season you are not alone.
We got the Amazon Echo Dot and it’s quite the cool little gadget. We hooked it up to control our lights. We purchased two outlet plugs along with the Dot. You can also get smart bulbs but did the plugs because they were cheaper and on sale, plus I wanted to test everything out first. There is so much this device can do it’s incredible. It’s like today’s version of Rosie from the Jetson’s. I will do a post reviewing the Dot at a later date, but I am going to talk about utilizing the Logitech Harmony Hub with the Amazon Echo Dot.
Once I had the Dot hooked up and doing basic things, I wanted to expand the capabilities that I had it doing, specifically I wanted it to control my home theater. For Alexa to do that, I needed to add a compatible Logitech Harmony remote control so she could turn the TV on and change the channels. When I want to turn on the TV, pause a movie or change the volume, I can just say the magic words aloud and not use a remote. Being able to control my home entertainment system with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant and a Logitech Harmony Hub is one of the coolest things ever, in my opinion.
Here’s how the smart home works with the Amazon Echo Dot and Logitech Harmony Hub
1. Get a Logitech Harmony Hub and an Amazon Echo Dot
2. Program your Harmony Hub
I read numerous posts that set-up wasn’t easy and took a lot of patience. For me, set-up went extremely smooth and was fairly easy. You can set-up the Harmony by downloading the app to your phone or on your desktop. I set it up through my computer. The thing to understand is instead of asking a specific device what to do, you’ll be controlling an activity instead. Harmony combines your devices into activities like “Watch TV,” which tells all your devices what to do at the same time. So when you say ‘turn on the Roku’, it will know to turn on your TV, access the correct HDMI port to turn on the Roku, and turn on your receiver for sound. You will be setting up all your devices in the Harmony and selecting which ones do what when you want certain things to turn on.
To do one of the coolest features, ask Alexa to switch to a particular channel, you’ll need to prep that in advance with the Harmony as well. Make sure you have a Watch TV activity, then go Settings > Harmony Setup > Add/Edit Devices & Activities > Favorites. The biggest tip that I could give you, is write down which devices are plugged into each of your HDMI ports and the model numbers for your devices in advance. I went walking back and forth for each device and the Harmony needs that info to be able to control every thing.
3. Prep the Amazon Echo and Sync with the Harmony Hub
Now it’s time to install the Harmony skill inside the Alexa app on your phone. Go to the Skills tab in the Alexa app, search for Harmony, and pick the “Harmony” skill with the blue logo. Log in with the same account you created for your Harmony. Before you finish setting up the skill, be sure to spend some time creating “friendly names” for each of the devices and favorite channels you want to control. They’re the names that Alexa will recognize when you say them out loud. Once your Alexa Harmony skill is synced up, refresh Alexa’s list of devices by pressing the “Discover devices” button in the Smart Home tab of the Alexa app.
4. Start playing around Alexa and the Harmony Hub
Alright, you’re all set. Here are a few voice commands to get started.
- “Alexa, turn on the TV”
- “Alexa, turn off the TV”
- “Alexa, turn on Netflix/Hulu”
- “Alexa, turn on Roku”
- “Alexa, channel up/down”
- “Alexa, volume up/down”
- “Alexa, pause”
- “Alexa, play”
I recommend that if you don’t have a Harmony Hub, definitely ask yourself how often you’d actually want to turn on, off, pause, play, adjust volume and mute, or switch to a particular activity or channel, with just the sound of your voice. Yes, it takes some time to set-up, but for me, it is totally worth it. Plus, I absolutely love feeling like we are living in the future. My entire family uses Alexa every day and now with the Harmony Hub.
