I love my Amazon Echo and the way Alexa controls so many of my smart home features; I love the simplicity and power of the Logitech Harmony Hub and Remote, and I especially love the fact that the two now work together. A new Amazon Alexa Skill makes it all possible.
Logitech’s Harmony Remote and Harmony Hub are a great way to control your media experience. The fact that Logitech has continually added new features and updates speaks to the company’s commitment to their customers. It only makes sense then that Logitech and Amazon would find a way to work together. After all, like Logitech, Amazon has been adding new skills and features to their Amazon Echo at a pace that is actually difficult to keep up with.
As Logitech explains, with this new Echo Skill the “Amazon Alexa Can Control Your Entire Family Room Entertainment Experience and Creates Novel Ways to Navigate your Smart Home with Harmony.”
The new skill, which can be enabled in the Alexa app on your smartphone or tablet, lets the Amazon Echo or Amazon Echo Dot start and stop Harmony Activities, control entertainment devices, and even jump directly to favorite channels simply by using your voice. For example, once the new Harmony skill is turned on you can simply say “Alexa, turn on the TV” and the TV will turn on. You can say, “Alexa, turn on Netflix” and the TV will jump to Netflix. After that, you can then use your voice to control the TV. Of course, you can also use voice to control other entertainment and smart home devices.
As Renee Niemi, general manager of the smart home business at Logitech explains,
“This new capability is both practical and fun for our users. We’ve been working closely with Amazon to deliver robust voice control of your smart home using a Harmony hub-based remote and an Alexa-enabled device — and if you don’t have Harmony yet, just say ‘Alexa, order a Harmony Hub’ and have one delivered.”
I realized just how powerful this new skill could be when I read that with Harmony Activities, different actions and more than 270,000 devices can be voice driven. In fact, using these skills you can combine a variety of actions to do multiple things at the same time For example, once you set it up you can say, “Alexa, turn on my evening activity.” The Amazon Echo or Echo Dot’s Alexa will then use the Logitech Harmony to initiate a series of pre-defined actions that immediately set things up just the way you want them.
Amazon is clearly as excited about this as Logitech is. As Rob Pulciani director of Alexa at Amazon shared,
“The Alexa experience just got smarter, thanks to our friends at Logitech. Logitech Harmony is an innovator in entertainment and smart home control, and together through this new Alexa skill and the Harmony hub-based remote, we’re bringing voice control of the living room entertainment experience to Alexa and Harmony customers.”
The amazon Echo is probably the best tech purchase I have made in a long, long time. And now that it works with the Logitech Harmony Hub, I like it even more. You can check it all out here.
You can buy a Logitech Harmony Hub here [affiliate link], and you can learn more about and purchase an Amazon Echo or Echo Dot here [affiliate link].