If when it comes to asking your smart speaker to play some music, podcasts or simply to respond to your requests, you have been startled by the volume at which it did, calm down because you are not alone. What has happened to you has also happened to many more users. Luckily, there is a very simple way to avoid these scares, especially at night.
Smart speakers and playback volume
Smart speakers offer many advantages, but they have not yet reached that level of perfection that allows them to behave and interact as if they were a real person. And we do not say it for its understanding capacities, but for details as apparently obvious as doing it at the same volume that it is spoken to.
This Alexa pretty much does with whisper mode. You speak to him in a whisper and Amazon’s voice assistant responds in the same way. But if it is not like that and you ask him, for example, to play some music, he will do so at the last established level. And of course, imagine that it was a high volume, the shock is fixed. Especially if it is at night and silence already reigns.
Luckily, there is a very simple solution that even Amazon’s own assistant is already beginning to offer its users thanks to its improvements in the proactive section. This consists of learning from the user’s habits and if at night it plays at most at level 3, when it is night it will not exceed that volume.
How do you do or achieve this? Well, in a very simple way and that you can extrapolate to the rest of voice assistants: routines or automations.
How to adjust the volume of your smart speaker according to the time
So that never again or, at least, on a regular basis you do not get a scare when you ask your smart speaker for something and it starts playing at full volume, all you have to do is create a routine in your assistant and define according to what hours what should be the volume at which it would have to respond.
Thus, for example, from a certain time of night you would go down almost to a minimum. Because with the silence of those hours, any small noise becomes a “roar”. And in the morning or at noon you could turn it up a bit in case you put on music while doing housework, cooking, etc.
How do you do this? Well, let’s see it for the three main voice assistant companies that exist right now: Apple, Google and Amazon.
Create a routine to adjust the Alexa volume
Let’s start with Alexa, Amazon’s assistant , although it is possible that it has already proposed to you at some point to do so. Even so, if you did not accept it at the time or if you want to create an additional one, here is how to do it:
- Open the Alexa application on your mobile
- Go to the More section and then access the Routines section
- Hit the + icon to create a new routine and give it a name: volume in the morning, in the afternoon, at night, at dawn, … here you send and you can create as many as you want
- You then set when it will be activated. For example, from a certain specific time, at dawn or dusk
- Then the days you want it to be configured
- And finally add the action: Device Configuration> Volume
- Ready now you just have to indicate the level and voila
Create a routine to adjust the volume of the HomePod
In the case that you have an Apple HomePod the process is practically identical, only that you will have to change one app for another. In the case of Apple, go to your iPhone, iPad or Mac and open the Home app and follow these steps:
- Tap on the + icon in the upper left corner and select add automation
- Select At a time of day and set at sunrise, sunset or a specific time
- Then the days that said action will be carried out
- Select the HomePod
- Now tap on Media Content
- Select Only adjust volume
- And then in Custom Volume set the level you want it to have
- Clever
Create a routine to adjust the volume of Google Assistant
Finally, with the Google assistant, the process of creating a routine that allows adjusting the volume to a certain level according to the time would be as follows:
- Open the Google Home app
- Hit create new Routine
- Select the time when it will run and which days it will repeat
- Now select the speaker where you want it to be modified
- Then select speaker volume settings
- Set the level you want for that moment
- Clever
Your smart speaker won’t scare you again
As you can see, the solution is so simple that it seems strange that it is not something that the assistants themselves offer more productively to users. Still, this is nothing new and many have been using it for a long time. And not only to set a volume at night, but also during other times of the day. Something that is very advisable to do, because those minutes that you waste in creating the routines the first time will help you avoid scares later.
Likewise, it is to be assumed that at some point it will be the voice assistants who will gain a degree of their own decision that according to your habits will know at what volume they should answer you or play audio at all times. It may even be, as we said, analyzing the level you speak to to sound the same unless you ask otherwise.
