Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 7 years and 10 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

For Father’s Day I got an Amazon Echo, Amazon’s voice-activated smart home speaker. You may know it (her?) as Alexa. If you’ve followed the blog, or even just glanced at it, you know I love tech gadgets and am also no stranger to dabbling in home automation so the Echo has been a fun toy to play with so far.

Setup is quick and straightforward: plug the Echo into a wall, install the Alexa app on your PC or mobile device (or use a browser) and she’ll guide you through the process of connecting to your home wireless network. You can then control the Echo through the app, but why would you do that when you can just say “Alexa, something” and she’ll respond to your voice command? The far-field microphones in the Echo are pretty good at picking up your voice from far away, even in a noisy room or when it’s playing music (although I do have to shout if I’m in another room). You can switch the wake word between “Alexa” and “Echo” but there are apparently ways to hack in custom wake words (I haven’t tried yet). Thankfully, the blue LED ring around the top of the Echo only comes on when you’ve activated Alexa or she’s processing a command. Other than that, there’s just a small white power LED on the back which isn’t too bad and barely noticeable in a dark room (and it’s very important to me that my devices don’t light up a room at night).

The power behind Alexa is based on skills, which you can think of as “applications” that enable functionality on your Echo. Through the web site or app (or now, even via voice) you can enable any number of custom skills third parties have developed. For example, I’ve added skills for my Automatic Link, Fitbit, Nest thermostat, and (the family’s favorite) to play Jeopardy. I’ve also linked it to IFTTT (more on that later). You can even develop your own with the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK). Check out this example of someone controlling a TiVo with Alexa, for example. I went through the tutorial to create a basic skill, which involved setting up Amazon Lambda and a developer account (both of which are basically free) but I need to find more time to learn and explore. There are a lot of skills for home automation as well, to link your Echo to all sorts of consumer home automation products like light bulbs, switches, electrical outlets, etc. (“Alexa, turn on the living room light”). Unfortunately, there isn’t a skill for ADT’s Pulse system that I use to control my Z-Wave devices, but I sort of expect that since Pulse is tied into the alarm system and is security-sensitive. That being said, ADT announced two years ago that they would be producing an IFTTT channel, but that has yet to materialize.

Speaking of IFTTT, you can use the Alexa channel to create your own trigger phrases and actions with any of the hundreds of recipes and channels out there. For example, Alexa has a built-in shopping list and to do list, which are stored on your Amazon account. I use GroceryIQ and Reminders app on my iPhone for this, though, neither of which has a related Alexa skill. So instead, I wrote up two IFTTT recipes so that when something is added to my Echo’s grocery or shopping list (“Alexa, add toilet paper to my shopping list”) I get an item in my iPhone’s Reminders app instead. For the grocery list, I prefix the to do with “GroceryIQ” so I know I need to manually add that item to the other app (which is fine for now). There is an iOS grocery app (OurGroceries) that supports Alexa directly, but after some quick testing I found GroceryIQ to still be the superior app.

Amazon is first and foremost an online shopping company so they obviously hope that the Echo locks you in even tighter to their own ecosystem. The Echo makes it very easy to buy things from Amazon (“Alexa, order something” and “Alexa, where’s my stuff?” to check on orders) although I haven’t actually tried any purchases yet. The Echo can play your Audible audio books or read your Kindle purchases as well. I did decide to give Amazon’s Music service a shot (for $25/year), uploading my entire music library to Amazon’s cloud so that I can easily play my songs through the Echo just by asking it (“Alexa, play my party mix”).

For now, I mainly use the Echo for playing music (as a speaker, it’s pretty good at filling a room) and checking the weather, calendar, or my commute time. It’s also handy for random fact-based queries (“Alexa, what time is it in Barcelona?”). My daughter loves hearing puns and jokes or playing with the easter eggs. I’ve read that a lot of people use the Echo a lot when they first get it and then usage tapers off once it’s not a new toy anymore. I’ll have to see if that happens in my house, but I’d like to find time to tinker with my own skills or more IFTTT recipes to see how I use the Echo more.

Amazon also recently released the Tap (a portable version of the Echo with a rechargeable battery) and Dot (version without the speaker) Alexa-enabled devices in the family. Check out the Love My Echo blog for more tips and tricks!