Controling Tv and others electronics with ALEXA

[JDRoberts]

Just wanted to mention I started a project topic detailing my Alexa/smart things/IFTTT/harmony set up for voice control of turning the TV on and off.

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…

As a quad, I try to have as much voice control as possible, but I haven’t felt justified in buying the $1500 voice IR units, and most of them don’t work very well anyway. They keep thinking the TV dialogue are voice commands.

Xfinity gave me a "voice remote " which is now available to their general customer base, but it’s the kind where you have to push the microphone button and hold it down while you are speaking. And it basically only substitutes for things where you would be trying to type text, like searches. But it works great for that. Saying “find days of future past” is a lot easier than doing that one letter at a time. Interestingly, the part it doesn’t do is the part that’s easy to do with harmony: change inputs from the Cable to Roku or the DVD player, or turn the whole thing off. The reason they make you hold down a microphone button instead of having an awake word, is that always listening uses a huge amount of battery power. Same reason Apple only as Siri always awake when the power is plugged into the phone or tablet.

Xfinity Voice Remote Overview

I can also push a physical button on the harmony universal remote, which is how I do volume changes, but it’s physically quite awkward for me, and tiring.

So I personally use voice with echo to start a harmony activity, including turning everything on and off and changing inputs, I use the Xfinity voice remote for searches, and I use the harmony physical universal remote for volume changes.

For physically able people I think the nicest thing about the voice is that since you are launching a harmony activity, you’re doing the equivalent of a whole bunch of buttons at once if you want. Basically a scene. You can turn on the TV and the Roku, change the input channel to the Roku, select a specific Roku channel to start with, to some of the lights off, and some of the lights to 50%, etc. all with one voice command like “Alexa, turn on movie scene.” And of course for people like me with limited hand function, every button press saved means a lot.