Smart home speakers
Think of your smart home speaker as your home assistant. Any little tasks you can think of, your speaker can probably help you.
Want to hear the weather, set an alarm, learn a new recipe, listen to music? These are just some of the things smart home speakers can help you with.
Your smart home speaker is the centre of your smart home setup, the hub from which you control your other smart devices like your smart lighting, smart thermostat, cameras and doorbell.
Smart speaker information
Smart speakers are designed to be really simple to set up, just follow the set up guide.
The only tricky part is learning all of the things that your smart speaker is capable of. They are surprisingly useful when you look at the list of commands you can use.
They also have some funny answers to questions built in too. Try asking your Google Nest to do the dishes or sing for you.
Many of us have a suspicion of our smart speaker listening to what we talk about.
One day you’re talking about something and then the next day you get an ad on your phone.
Though it may seem like your smart speaker is listening to you, it’s actually only listening for the ‘wake word’, whatever word(s) you use to ask your smart speaker something – ‘Hey Google’ or ‘Alexa’.
The sound quality on smart speakers is actually surprisingly good. In the WarmZilla office we use a Google Nest Mini, which is small but mighty. For such a small device the sound quality is impressive. Agreeing on what to listen to is the tricky part.
Generally speaking, you can connect most smart devices with a smart speaker.
It’s always easier to connect the same brand. Having all Amazon products would be easier to set up than having a mix of brands.
Having said that, as the smart home market grows, manufacturers of smart home devices are realising they need to work together to make life easier for the customer.
Even if you can’t natively connect two different smart home devices, you can use technology to bridge the gap between them by using something like IFTTT (If This Then That). To programme how you want the two products to connect.