No. However, you can tell it to change to TV, PS4 or whatever. If you use logitech as a smart home hub then it will do those tasks too. To be honest, I use the harmony way more than Alexa.
Amazon Echo - anyone have one?
- Thread starter Kemik
- Start date
No. However, you can tell it to change to TV, PS4 or whatever. If you use logitech as a smart home hub then it will do those tasks too. To be honest, I use the harmony way more than Alexa.
Thanks
At the moment I have one of these
I press the activity on the touch screen and voila!
Watch TV
Play Game
https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17954523
Voice would be good but all I do at the mo is just press a button...is this worth 129.99...hmm....
Yonomi is an app/cloud service which connects together smart home devices that might not necessarily talk to each other directly.
So the Logitech Harmony Hub works natively with Philips Hue stuff, but not with Amazon Alexa. At least not in the UK, yet. So you can connect your Alexa and Logitech accounts to Yonomi, and create routines in Yonomi which can be triggered however you like. In this case, an Alexa command (with the Yonomi addin for Alexa) can trigger Harmony activities via Yonomi. Part of my Harmony activities include setting the Hue lights to certain scenes, so if I say "Alexa, turn on Apple TV", it'll tell the Harmony to fire up all my AV gear, set the input on my AV receiver to 'Apple TV', and set the lights.
It does work quite well - it's not as shoddy as it sounds. Voice control is a bit of a gimmick (at least for now - who knows how more advanced Alexa will become in the future) but for the price of an Echo Dot (£50) I thought I'd give it a whirl. I wouldn't pay £150 for the full-fat Echo.
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Thanks for the clear explanation..so how do you control the apple TV?
Can you set it to fire UP AV gear turn on apple tv and open the Now TV app?
It only controls the Apple TV via IR, so no it can't open apps. It can on various smart TVs and such though. I still keep the Apple TV remote on the coffee table but it's nice to have one remote that does literally control everything.
My Harmony one pretty much controls everything apart from my Amazon Fire...
My dream is to have a Black Mirror esq setup. Where I can just say "Watch TV", "pause" "rewind" etc...
Opening apps would be awesome...The Fire TV sort of does
Maybe time to change to a Harmony remote that uses the Hub then, more and more devices are starting to use Bluetooth instead of IR.
Kinda surprised the Fire TV doesn't have native support with Echo yet though.
Yeah but odd that...still undecided yet lol
That is already happening through mobile phones - and anyone can access anyones phone with the right hardware and software. I was shocked how easy it can be done and how to stop it albeit a pain in the rear. Same applies with camera too.
I don't really see where these comments come from as it's not a complicated concept. Here it is - you can control/do things with your voice. Have you seen pretty much any sci-fi movie set in the future? You've seen what this develops into.
I like the voice search though....
Soldato
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Thought I'd better update to say my Echo has been retired from active use already. It's planned use as a dementia aid for Mum failed due to Mum's insistence on throwing too many conversational phrases at it, and she can't learn the right 'pared back' way of addressing it. It did integrate well with my Google calendar, but she couldn't access it with a phrase which made sense to her.
There were also occasional messages from it when nobody said Alexa, including some strange error messages. They were too confusing for Mum.
I also hadn't done my homework on the music front. I knew it'd only work with Amazon during the trial Prime period, but I didn't realise you needed Spotify Premium, and we don't the revenue stream for that kind of thing these days. I may be tempted to try Google's offering later, because I can show that cheap CDs of Mum's music and add them to my Google library very easily. But it'll depend how flexible they are with the wake-up phrase.
There were also occasional messages from it when nobody said Alexa, including some strange error messages. They were too confusing for Mum.
I also hadn't done my homework on the music front. I knew it'd only work with Amazon during the trial Prime period, but I didn't realise you needed Spotify Premium, and we don't the revenue stream for that kind of thing these days. I may be tempted to try Google's offering later, because I can show that cheap CDs of Mum's music and add them to my Google library very easily. But it'll depend how flexible they are with the wake-up phrase.
These are the prices expected for the Black Friday sale on the Fire stuff, the pound is close enough to the dollar these days that it'll roughly be the same for us.
I'll get one for 39.99 for the fun of it...
