​Home Assistants

Image by Finn from Pixabay

There are 2 main home assistants these days, Google’s Nest, and Amazon’s Alexa. Functionally, they are very similar. I got one to play music, an Alexa. Amazon has allowed Prime customers to access the Amazon library of music, so there is quite a lot of choice. Aside from that, assistants can tell jokes, give you the weather, answer all sorts of questions, and much more. You can turn on lights, order stuff, or broadcast on it like an intercom.

A good comparison of Nest and Alexa home assistants can be found HERE. 

If you don’t know what I’m talking about at all, a home assistant, in this case, is a small device that has a speaker. We use ours mostly to play music. It also has a microphone. Our Alexa is an Amazon product and can be used to order things easily from them. I’ve never done that. It can also connect to compatible devices designed to control things, like your lights and thermostat. You can then use a voice command to turn up the heat, turn off the lights, and even broadcast a message, like an intercom, to somewhere else in your house that has an assistant. Learn about that function Here
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We don’t use it nearly as much as is offered, however, there are people that do. My kids use it to control lighting in their home, which seems so high tech to me when we’re sitting there talking and she says “Google, turn off living room light.”

Carol occasionally asks Alexa about something, like the weather, or the time, or who invented asphalt. There are several variations of the home assistant now. There are larger versions with better audio, and some come with screens. You can make “phone” calls as well, if it’s SETUP to do so. Learn about that  Here
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Some of these things are more tedious to setup than others, and obviously, I haven’t been bothered to connect anything, but I still like using the little Alexa that we have. Music, jokes, information, those don’t require anything extra and that’s what I like.