A few years ago it was not common to find equipment in our home such as a smart speaker, light bulbs that are controlled from the phone or a robot vacuum cleaner that, just by asking in our own words, starts cleaning the house. However now, unless you are a somewhat technological person, surely you have it present in your day to day. One of the management “systems” par excellence is the one provided by Amazon through its intelligent assistant. The problem comes when you let home automation “flood you” and end up with 5, 10 or 15 different accessories in the Amazon app. Today we show you how to fix this by ordering all your digital home devices with Alexa .
How to connect new devices to Alexa?
The first thing you should be clear about is how we can add new equipment to the Alexa digital home system. And the truth is that, depending on the product we are talking about, it will be more or less simple (although the normal thing is that it does not take us more than 5 minutes in any case).
If you have already done this process on other occasions, you can go to the next section. But if you are just starting out in the world of home automation, you will only have to:
- Open the Alexa app on your phone (Android or iOS).
- In the menu on the bottom bar, select the Devices option.
- Within this new menu you have two options: if you have already connected the light bulb, speaker or whatever smart device it is, it will appear in a message (top pop-up) indicating that a new device has been detected ; on the other hand, if you don’t see this message, you just have to click on the “+” icon in the upper right corner.
- If you click on this icon, you will see a new menu with different options. Click on “Add device”. Then we will see what the rest of the options are useful for.
- Again, we will be faced with a large number of alternatives to choose from. On the one hand, if we want to add an Amazon smart team, we will usually have to select the Amazon Echo. If this is not your case, it will depend on the device in question: you can click inside the “category” of the type of device such as a switch, a camera, light, etc., or write the name of the brand in the search bar higher.
At this point, we cannot explain the steps to follow in detail because, once again, it will depend on the accessory and brand in question. What we can tell you is that, following the steps that you will see on your phone screen from now on, normally in a matter of 2-3 minutes that device will appear in the “linked with Alexa” catalog of your account.
Amazon Echo with or without Zigbee Bridge
So far, this is the natural process for adding new smart devices to Alexa. But, because you did not know, there are some accessories (which are mainly smart bulbs) that may need an intermediary between Alexa and your WiFi connection. This is what is known as bridges or connection bridges that will usually use Zigbee technology.
Zigbee, in case it didn’t sound like anything to you, is a communication protocol that different smart devices have and that will allow us to connect these gadgets and control them from the phone or with voice commands. The bridges or Zigbee bridge will act as an intermediary between the smart accessory that we want to connect and the router itself. These connection bridges can be purchased separately from the brand of the product that we want to connect, as is the case with Philips smart bulbs. Or, to be more practical, we can get an Amazon smart speaker that, inside, has a “universal” Zigbee bridge.
Some of the models that include this type of technology within Amazon’s smart speaker catalog are:
- Amazon Echo (4th Generation).
- Amazon Echo Studio.
- Amazon Echo Show 10 (3rd Generation).
- Amazon Echo Plus: this particular model has already stopped being marketed, but if you already had one, it can help you.
Perhaps, of these the one that is most common that we buy for our home is the new Amazon Echo “just”. If you are interested in knowing more about it and all its benefits, you can take a look at our analysis that we carry out on YouTube:
And, if you are recently starting in this of home automation and the connected home, you may have doubts about what these devices can contribute to you. In another of the videos that we publish on our channel, we tell you what it is like to live with Amazon’s smart speaker ecosystem, we think you might find it interesting:
How to order devices on Alexa?
And well, having said all the above, let’s go with what is truly interesting in this article: organizing our digital home with Alexa. Actually, it is quite simple and we will depend mainly on the “Groups”.
Groups for the digital home
So that we understand it very simply, the groups within the Alexa app are nothing other than the rooms, come on, the rooms of our house . The best way to organize the smart devices in our home is to create a group for each room in the house where we have one of these accessories. Thus there will be no possible confusion.
Now, how do you create a group within Alexa? Well, it is so simple how:
- Open the Alexa application again and go to the “Devices” section where we were before.
- Now click once more on the “+” in the upper right corner.
- In the next step, within the drop-down menu, we will have to press the “Add group” option .
- Again, we will arrive at another screen in which it gives us the alternatives of «Create a new room or group», or, «Combine existing groups». In this case, we are going to create a new one.
- Choose the name you want to give to this group from the presets, or customize it to your liking in the last option. To finish, click on «Finish».
- On this screen select the smart device you want to add to this group. Click “Next” again to continue.
- Now, if there is a smart speaker in the list of connected equipment, on this screen you will have the possibility to add it. Click “Next” again to finish.
If you follow this step by step you will have created a new group within your account. From now on, you can see it on the main screen of the “Devices” section of Alexa. And, of course, you can interact with this group using voice commands, for example, we can tell the assistant “Alexa, turn off all the lights in the room.”
Move devices within Alexa
Another of the most frequently asked questions, especially if you have a lot of technological gadgets connected to your account, is how you can move a device from one group to another . It is much simpler than it seems:
- Within the Alexa app, in the “Devices” section, scroll down to the new group where you want to locate the accessory and enter it.
- Once here, click on “Edit” in the upper right corner.
- In this new window you will see all the devices linked to your account. From this you can modify all the products that you want to appear in this group.
Remove Alexa devices
Finally, if you want to delete a device that is no longer in your digital home for any reason, the process does not have any complications either:
- Locate the device in question either through a group or from the app’s own list.
- When entering it, in addition to being able to control any of its aspects (turn off, turn on, lower the intensity, etc.), you will see a gear in the upper right corner. Access it.
- Here are different characteristics of this equipment. And, again, in the same corner as before, we will see a trash can. If you want to delete this accessory, press it and confirm your decision in the pop-up.
It’s that simple to manage the basics of your smart home devices with Alexa. If you have any questions, you can leave it for a comment and we will try to solve it as soon as possible.
