Unbelievable Alexa Experience -- GOOD

So, I bought an Amazon Echo for my wife for Christmas (even she won't believe that)and while she was not around, I spent a few minutes setting it up.

I was blown away with the voice recognition. Right out of the box it was responding with stuff like weather, play songs, Pandora, etc. Great recognition, even from the next room!

The reason I was interested in the Echo was that voice recognition for home automation has always been the holy grail, and it has never worked very well. I've always given up. All the reports were that the Echo voice recognition was superb -- and it is!

I had scanned several threads in the past about several approaches to getting HS3 to work with the Echo, all sounding cumbersome to set up and maintain. The smoothest approach seemed to be via IFTTT through an available plugin.

Well, I finally had some time to play with this today.

Now, I had no IFTTT account, no MyHomeseer account, and knew nothing about them. About the only thing I had accomplished before today was to register the Echo and initial configuration (straight forward).

It took me less than 30 minutes to do the following:

I went to the IFTTT site, created a userid, and browsed the triggers and channels. Saw there was an Alexa/Echo trigger, tried to connect to it, asked for my Amazon credentials, and I was good to go. Browsed to the HomeSeeer channel, tried to connect, it gave me detailed steps to create MyHomeseer account and connect. Nothing to it. Tired to create a recipe, selected Alexa as trigger, one of the options was if someone says: "Alexa Trigger", I selected it. Then I selected Homeseer as the THAT in the recipe, one of the options was to run an Event, selected that and it gave me a list of all of the Events from my installation. Selected it, and that's it. NO IFTTT plugin.

It took me less than 30 minutes to set all of this up, and now I can say either:

Alexa trigger Christmas tree ON

or

Alexa trigger Christmas tree OFF

and they both work everytime, very quickly.

Can't wait until wife opens present, we go through a few things like get weather, play music, and then I say: Alex Trigger Christmas Tree OFF

WAF definitely going up!

tenholde

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