Table of Contents
- 1 Best Alexa Skills
- 1.1 Table of Contents
- 1.2 Best Alexa Skills
- 1.3 The Best Alexa Skills for Streaming TV and Music Playback
- 1.4 The Best Alexa Skills for News and Information
- 1.5 The Best Alexa Skills for Home Security
- 1.6 Alexa Performance to Control the Lights in Your Smart Home
- 1.7 Alexa to Regulate Temperature in Your Home
- 1.8 Alexa for Control of Samsung SmartThings Devices
- 1.9 Conclusion
Best Alexa Skills
Do you want to make alexa smarter?. Discover the best alexa skills for your smart house. And improve the performance of your echo speaker with our advice.
Today, you will find Amazon’s Alexa voice-controlled virtual assistant in a range of devices including the Alexa Echo range of smart speakers, in mobile phones and even in cars.
However, if you are to take full advantage of the capabilities this virtual assistant has to offer for your smart home, you should check out the more than 100,000 Alexa skills available.
Skills are the special Alexa commands that you can say to your AI-powered device for it to perform specified tasks that range from turning on a heater to ordering takeout.
So if you need to make Alexa a smart and convenient assistant to have in your home, or you are new to smart home technology and simply want to know where to start, we have you covered.
Below are just a handful of the growing number of Alexa skills you can use to make your life easier.
The Alexa app allows you to control your Fire TV device using your Echo devices. This skill can open a streaming application or play specific movies or TV shows by searching the genre, title or actor names.
Newer Sony TVs also have Alexa integration. This means that, with an Alexa Echo command, you can turn the TV on or off, control the volume, and even change channels.
The Amazon Echo also gives you several ways to enjoy the music you love. For instance, you can connect the Echo device to your Bluetooth speaker to enjoy better audio quality. Additionally, you can use the smart speaker for voice control of your Sonos speakers.
To make this work, you need to add the Sonos skill to the Alexa app. Once done, Alexa can recognize any Sonos devices that you have on your home network. You could also attach external Sonos speakers to your Echo using a cable.
This only works if your device has a 3.5mm port, like the 2017 Amazon Echo or the Echo Dot. When you have your music playing, you may go ahead and use your voice for control of the playback volume alongside the device’s physical controls.
Although many people like to simply tell Alexa to turn the volume up or down, Alexa commands also give you the option to request for a specific volume. Thanks to this skill, you can ask Alexa to adjust the volume to any number between 1 and 10.
If you feel that getting your morning news from the radio is too tedious for your taste, you could have Alexa provide a “flash briefing.”
This skill condenses news into smaller, bite-sized chunks, and is one of the most impressive Alexa skills available.
Several news outlets offer flash briefings of some form, and some will work better with the Alexa app than others.
Checking weather forecasts is one of those things we always know we should do, but for some reason, the process of firing up a weather app or watching weather forecasts on TV just seems like too much hassle.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Alexa skills can cause people to completely change their ways, but having an intelligent digital assistant will certainly make accessing weather information more convenient.
To avoid being caught up in inclement weather when you leave your house, you could simply ask, “Alexa, what is the weather like?” every morning and instantly get an update of the forecast for your area.
However, you must ensure that you have your correct address set up in the Alexa app to get the most accurate weather report.
For all homeowners, the security of their family and possessions is a top priority. Well, the good news is that, thanks to Alexa skills, your Amazon Echo device now works as your security guard for your home.
If you own an Amazon Echo or any other Alexa gadget, you can train certain home security systems to be voice activated.
This capability has been rolled out starting in the U.S., with firms like Ring, Adobe, Scout Alarm, Honeywell and ADT, who have all signed up to let Alexa’s Security Panel Controller to interface with their respective security systems, allowing voice control of their features.
Thanks to the smart app, you can enable or disable burglar alarms or trigger a variety of security settings when you are away or asleep to ensure that nothing untoward happens.
Nothing is cooler than being able to use voice to turn the lights in your house on and off. With the Philips Hue skill that is available on the Amazon Echo, there are Alexa commands to let you do just that.
When you enable the Philips Hue skill, your Alexa app will search for all the Hue smart lighting fixtures installed in your home. If you have correctly named the bulbs, you could then say something like, “Dim the porch light” or “Turn on the living room lights” and the AI assistant will obey your commands.
The best thing with this skill is that it lets you command Alexa to turn on specific lights or to control all the lights in a particular room. You can see more in The Best Smart Light Bulbs.
If your home has a Nest Learning Thermostat installed, you may want to enable the Nest skill on your Amazon Echo or Alexa Dot device. This then enables you to control heating in your home with voice commands.
When you have the Nest skill set up, you could say “Set the living room temperature to 72 degrees” or ask Alexa to “Lower the bedroom temperature by 5 degrees,” for instance. This saves you the hassle of opening an application on your mobile device.
Thanks to the continuous updates made to the Nest Alexa skill, it will become possible to activate certain AI-powered features using the Alexa Echo device that are not possible with other control methods.
For instance, if you say, “I’m leaving,” Alexa will instruct the Nest thermostat to gradually lower the temperature to save energy. You could also say “Alexa, I am too hot,” whereby the Alexa Dot will instruct the thermostat to turn the temperature of the room down by a few degrees.
With this Alexa skill, you have lots of convenient and useful tricks to try out.
Samsung has developed an extensive range of smart home devices under the SmartThings brand.
Thanks to the SmartThings Alexa skill, you can now control these devices with your Amazon Echo, Dot or any other Alexa-powered device.
With this skill installed on your device, you can control a large number of compatible Samsung devices with your voice.
The skill exposes a variety of voice commands that you can pick from, dependent on the SmartThings devices you have in your house.
Conclusion
It is impossible to rank the Alexa skills for your smart home since everyone’s routines and requirements are unique. However, we think that the skills above stand out as they are useful to most Alexa users.