"Alexa, call my phone"

[JDRoberts]

You might find the project interesting that I did to allow echo voice control of my harmony universal remote using smartthings and virtual switches.

So now I can say “turn on ESPN TV” and echo tell smart things to turn on a virtual switch, smart things turns on the virtual switch, IFTTT recognizes that the virtual Switch was turned on and tells harmony to turn on the corresponding harmony activity, harmony does that, and bang! ESPN starts playing in the living room. It sounds complicated but it happens in under two seconds.

The Basic approach is the same for any use of virtual switches, it’s just set the intermediate steps will be different:

Alexa + SmartThings + IFTTT + Harmony to turn TV on and off by voice (2015 version)

Updated 12 November 2015 after Amazon added “Triggers” to their IFTTT Channel for Alexa As valuable as I personally found this project, and as much as I learned in doing it, as of 12 November 2015 it’s now no longer necessary. Amazon has added verbal triggers to their IFTTT channel. So you can say anything you want to as a trigger to Alexa and use that as the “if” for an IFTTT recipe, and have that trigger anything that has an IFTTT “that” channel. So SmartThings, Philips Hue, Harmony activities, etc. No virtual switches needed, no synch issues. It really is that easy. If you’re new to IFTTT, here’s a good overview: You may still want to use the direct Harmony/SmartThings integration to control certain aspects of TV watching, like limiting your kids to 30 minutes of Net…