Alexa is Amazon’s all-knowing and interactive voice assistant. Available on Amazon’s lineup of lamps, lights, soundbars, smart thermostats, and Echo speakers, and right on your phone via your Alexa app. With Alexa, you will be able to create voice-first experiences that deliver a more intuitive way to interact with your plugs, switches, and inside and outside lights.
Smart home technology is becoming more popular now because people are looking for new ways of making their lives easier. You also have various ways to control your lighting.
Yes, you can control your outside lights through Alexa. You can use Alexa for a lot more than simply listening to music, setting timers, and asking what the weather’s going to be like. It is very easy to use your Alexa app, Amazon Echo, or even the Alexa Auto in the car to control your smart outdoor lighting.
Fortunately, Alexa can control a large number of lights, so you don’t need to worry about changing your lights. With your regular outdoor lights, you just need a smart plug or a smart switch.
Anyway, Alexa is very adept at making your smart home tech work together. It’s extremely easy to set up any lighting. Please read more about my articles.
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How to Control Outdoor lights with Alexa
Alexa is a voice-controlled virtual assistant. It can control your smart home, play audio, and engage your favorite services to keep you informed, organized, connected, safe, and entertained. You can use it everywhere from cars to smartwatches.
Smart home control has emerged into one of the most important areas of Alexa’s influence. I will tell you how to control your outdoor lighting with Alexa. I am sure you will like it.
Knowing how to use Alexa to control your smart lighting is very useful if you need the full ‘I live in the future experience. But some basics you will be interested to know and I will tell you how it works with your regular outdoor lights and Alexa.
You might be wondering, “what is the Amazon Echo?”
Amazon Echo and Outside Lights
Even if you don’t have an Amazon Echo device, you have almost absolutely heard the name of its virtual voice assistant. Anyone who has embraced Alexa certainly has an Echo product to thank.
Let’s start at the beginning. Amazon introduced the product at the end of 2014, It’s a hardware lineup that looks like a family of unassuming displays, speakers, and alarm speakers. It is basically made up of three components: a simple computer, an internet connection, and a speaker.
Amazon Alexa is an amazing virtual assistant, and there are lots of tasks you can get down with it. But you have to learn the Alexa commands if you want to do their tasks.
You can control your outdoor lighting with the Amazon Echo. Learning Alexa voice commands needs a bit of time, but doing so is necessary to work with your devices.
To get started you need the Alexa app for your iPad, iPhone, or Android to set up any of your Amazon Echo speakers.
The Alexa App
While voice search features were limited to some flagship smartphones once, the Alexa app can bring lots of great features to many iPhones and Android devices in some form. But here I just talk about controlling outdoor lighting with the Alexa app.
The Alexa app is very simple to use and will walk you through all the settings you can play with to make your Echo set up just how you need it. It is massively popular, with more and more helpful Alexa skills rolling out each day. Now, you can find it in vacuum cleaners, and robots, not to mention thousands of third-party apps that use Alexa for voice recognition.
Alexa is smart-home savvy, so it provides you voice control over lots of different home-automation products, including thermostats, lights, security cameras, baby monitors, and door locks. You can organize your smart lighting into various rooms and set schedules.
If you don’t have an echo device, you still can use your smartphone for voice commands with Alexa app although using it isn’t quite as good as on smart speakers.
How to Control Outside Lights from Your Car With Alexa
Amazon Echo8 Auto can bring most of Alexa’s voice assistant features to your vehicle. You can receive turn-by-turn directions, stream audio, shop on Amazon and make phone calls, and more. For less than $50, it brings modern functionality to your older auto.
Alexa Auto truly isn’t any different from an Echo device you’d have in your home, though you would select to rely on it for different tasks when driving than you use most often when at home. But you should know that it needs an internet connection or you can use it to connect your smartphone.
Alexa Auto can be integrated with almost all of your Alexa-powered smart home devices. You can use it to activate your home alarm system, adjust your Nest thermostat, and even turn on your outside lights before you get home.
Can you use Alexa on a smartwatch?
When it comes to voice assistants, it’s very tough to beat Amazon’s Alexa. If you have a smartwatch, you will be interested to know if it can use Alexa to control it.
Have you ever needed to check the Fitbit devices to know how you slept the night before, but your hands were busy washing dishes? Or you want to know how many steps you have taken, but you were preparing breakfast for your baby. Now Alexa can help you with these.
Fitbit’s Versa 2 smartwatch has Amazon Alexa built-in, allowing you to ask your Alexa to help with your various tasks, like controlling your compatible smart home devices. However, to get Alexa to work on your Fitbit, you have to activate it.
If you have a Skagen or a Gen 6 Fossil smartwatch, like the Fossil Gen 6, Skagen Falster Gen 6, you can now use Amazon Alexa properly on your watch. This will be useful if your smart home revolves around Alexa.
Basic light commands for Alexa
With the easy-to-use light commands for Amazon Alexa, it will take your lighting system to the next level. If you have the app on your smartphone and have set up your Alexa, it’s time to learn how to control your lights with voice commands.
First, you should set your light in the Alexa App by following steps:
To use the Alexa voice service, simply plug in the device, connect it to your wifi network, and then start issuing your voice commands. I will tell you various voice commands you will use to control your lighting.
List of Alexa Voice Commands
What can you ask your Alexa? Here I will put together some of the most useful ones.
- “Alexa, Turn on the porch light.”
- “Alexa, Turn the drive light green.”
- “Alexa, Make the lights warmer.”
- “Alexa, Turn on the lights.”
- “Alexa, Turn off the lights.”
- “Alexa, Set the backyard to Party.”
- “Alexa, Dim the garage light by 25%.”
Alexa smart lights colors come in 123 different hues and shades. You can change the colors of most of your smart lights with the Alexa mobile app or your voice. If you like colors such as lavender and crimson, you also can use them. You also can change the Kelvin temperature and dim light with Alexa
Alexa is one of the smartest voice assistants that you will get and it is fully compatible with various applications that are being used.
With the right additional hardware, you are able to get Alexa to turn your individual lights or whole groups of lights off and on. You also can have them turn on and off automatically at set times by using Routines.
If you do more research, you will find more voice commands for your tasks, you will find out lots of advanced features in the future.
As with your indoor smart lighting, there are different benefits to be had by integrating your outdoor lighting with your smart home platform. With Alexa, you will gain remote control, convenience, and automation capabilities that will enhance your home security and entertaining. If you want to buy smart lighting, Philips hue is one of your options.
However, if you don’t have smart lighting and want to have a smart home, I will give you some tips below.
How to Use Alexa to Control Regular Outdoor Lights
Smart home technology has developed in leaps and bounds in just a couple of short years and is getting better as time goes on. It just takes very little expense and effort to turn regular lights into smart lights. If you have a large outdoor garden or a small apartment patio, smart devices can help in many ways.
You can find two easy workarounds to do the tasks.
Smart Switches and Dimmers
One of the best smart light switches is a very economical way to make all of your regular lights connected to your smart home. While a smart light switch works like a regular switch, as it is linked to the cloud, so you can control it from your smartphone remotely with a voice assistant like Google Assistant, Alexa, or Siri.
It is also very easy to have your smart light dimmers and switches embedded in your wails.
While you have installed your smart switches or dimmers, you just issue a command to your switch, rather than sending commands to your lights. So you don’t need to replace your light but still get smart home features.
When you connect Alexa capabilities to your switches and dimmers, so the Alexa voice service can control your regular lighting, they will be substantial changes when you integrate it with your smart home system.
Here are some best smart dimmer/smart switch
- Lutron Caséta Wireless Smart Lighting Dimmer Switch Starter Kit
- C by GE 4-wire Smart Motion + Dimming
- Jasco Enbrighten Zigbee In-Wall Smart Dimmer
- Leviton Decora Z-Wave Plus dimmer (model DZ6HD)
- Brilliant Control
- Leviton Decora Smart Voice Dimmer with Amazon Alexa (model DWVAA)
- TP-Link Smart Wi-Fi Light Switch, Dimmer (model HS220)
Smart Plugs
You use smart plugs to plug directly into your traditional power strip or a wall outlet, and you then plug into your device that you need to automate. You are not losing or gaining any outlets by plugging your smart plug-in.
The smart plugs enable you to take almost any old piece of your home electronics and make it smart. A simple smart plug lets you turn your lamps on and off over your Wi-Fi. What’s more, you will be able to set up automation so your lights can turn on or off at sunset.
Designed to be used with the Amazon Alexa ecosystem, you can control the Amazon Smart Plug through the Alexa app or voice commands. It doesn’t need a hub and just takes less than 2 minutes literally to set up. If the smart plug is called “win plug”, so you will just say:
“Alexa, turn off win plug”
With a smart plug, you can make your “dump” gadget smart, so you don’t need to struggle across a dark room with your hand full, just say “Alexa, turn on the bedside light”.