Alexa can now control your smart home devices without voice commands

Alexa can now control your smart home devices without voice commands

Alexa is getting even smarter and can now proactively control your smart home devices based on your previous requests and behavior. The Alexa Hunches feature, which was introduced in the United States in 2018, offers suggestions for your smart home devices. For example, if you said "Good night" to Alexa and a smart light was still on, Alexa would offer to turn it off for you. However, you need to confirm that Alexa can perform the action before it happens, either by responding to your audible feedback or by tapping the notification that appears on your smartphone. Now, Amazon is rolling out the ability to make these actions automatic, reducing the number of interactions you need to perform on a daily basis with Amazon's voice assistant. Hunches will work with a number of smart home devices, including smart lights, smart locks, and even smart thermostats. Alexa's hunches are different from routines, which are automations programmed by the user to occur at a certain time or when a certain phrase is spoken. Hunches are automations based on assumptions from Alexa instead of having to create routines in advance.

How to activate Alexa Hunches

Alexa's hunches are on by default, but if you don't want Alexa to prompt you before initiating the action, you'll need to enable 'automatic actions' in the Alexa app. Open the app and tap on More. Now choose Settings and scroll down, selecting Hunches. Choose the automatic actions settings and select the ones you want to activate. The options will be based on the compatible smart home devices you have installed.

How to turn off Alexa Hunches

If you want to turn Hunches off, you can say “Turn Hunches off” to Alexa or open the Alexa app and tap More. Select Settings and scroll to the Checked Intentions section, then turn Hunches off.