Amazon Guard Available yet? (May 2019)

Well that’s not great… Although I would still be somewhat surprised if ADT didn’t put some effort into integration. They don’t make much on the sale / support of the “official” hardware, and can charge a recurring fee for monitoring Alexa Guard. They would have gravel between the ears to not find a way to support it. Having said that, I have met far too many people with positions that require a neck tie where the tie is obviously restricting blood flow to the brain…

I just realized you can use the two device method with Amazon’s own Geolocation option in their own routines without needing smartthings for this. You have to use the Amazon Alexa app on your phone then create a routine there for when your phone comes and goes. Have that routine speak the activation phrase on one echo device at your home so that another echo device at your home can hear it. Geolocation was only added to Amazon routines a few months ago, but it is there. :sunglasses:

Using SmartThings with the virtual sensor method would allow you to set up a lot more filters on when it happens, and this is not going to work well for a lot of multi person households, but this is an option for simple use cases.

@Automated_House @HA_fanatic

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I have a smart plug for every room for “Vacation mode” lighting that I use with Webcore and it works well. Hopefully someday Guard will support those too for Away Lighting - one less piston to maintain.

in Alexa you can set whether a device is a light or not. If you change it to light it should work.

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Does anyone know of a way to limit when Alexa Guard does the lights thing? I don’t particularly want it turning lights on and off during daylight hours…

It’s supposed to use AI over time so that it figures out what your typical lighting patterns are and then it tries to mimic those. But early adopters reported it took a month or so to start getting this right.

How does Away Lighting work?
With Away Lighting, Alexa automatically turns your smart lighting on and off to make it look like you’re home while you’re away. Alexa uses machine learning to determine the right lighting activity for your home based on lighting usage across customers. Just set Guard to Away mode and Alexa will do the rest.

Eventually, though, it should not be turning lights on during the day time unless you typically turn those lights on during the day time.

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Awesome !! Learnt something new today.

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It prompts for your zip code when you enable Alexa Guard, so I’m actually surprised it would even attempt to toggle lighting before sunset or after sunrise. Not much “AI” required for that.

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Things may have changed since the initial release in limited markets last year. I don’t think we ever got all the details about how it decides what to turn on when. :sunglasses:

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For what it’s worth, I used Guard for the first time the other day and forgot to deactivate it when we returned from our day trip. We left around 10am and arrived around 11pm. I didn’t notice Alexa was still guarding until 11am the following day, and only because the Echo in my office had a white chasing ring. I actually have no idea if any of my lights were toggled while I was away, and I did not observe any lights going off and on while I was home and Alexa was still in Guard mode.

So actually, my experience doesn’t confirm much of anything. The AI might be smart enough to realize I wouldn’t be toggling my lights after midnight or in the morning if I were home. The AI might have figured out I was already home even though I didn’t disable Guard. The AI might not have had enough history to toggle any lights. The AI also might not bother toggling lights after sunrise. And finally, the whole feature might just be vaporware and Amazon can use “AI” as an excuse for why you can’t ever observe the feature first hand. :exploding_head:

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Well, I just got home after setting Alexa Guard on. (I enabled it while away via the Alexa phone app.) 90% of the lights were on in the house and it looks like they were all turned on about 30 minutes before sunset. We never use this many lights at any given time, and wouldn’t just turn on the whole house at once like that. So I think the “AI” is a fricken “DA”. I probably just need to restrict the lighting feature to a very few select lights. I had already excluded closet lights. That’s too bad. I had hoped it would be a bit more nuanced and behave more “naturally”.

Update: OK, I found that the Away Lighting history can be found in the Alexa phone app. So I was able to conclude that it didn’t just turn everything on at once. But, it sure was a bit hyperactive and did a lot of switching on before sunset. I went ahead and looked at the history from my last day trip when I returned after midnight. It looks like most of lighting activity happened between 7 and 8ish, and then it eventually turned off all the lights by 11:45pm. It also looks like it turned some of the lights on and off around 4 to 5 am. So I wouldn’t say that the times chosen were that unusual for our daily routine, but the lights chosen weren’t typical…so that makes me wonder if the times and amount of activiy is more based on deterring a would be intruder and not so much simulating my personal lighting routine.

I turned mine off, my cat does a better job at turning the lights on when we are not home :slight_smile:

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Lol…I have a cat that would open the front door if it wasn’t locked.

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Posted this in another Alexa Guard thread: