Can you imagine living in a time where you can talk to your home? It’s a thing, thanks to voice assistants. Voice Assistants are merely software that communicate with a person audibly, and in return carry out voice enabled commands. Pretty cool right?
Now that people can communicate with their homes, or carry out the simplest of tasks like locking the front door or turning the living room lights on, who wouldn’t want that technology in their house? Some of the infamous voice assistants globally recognized are Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home’s Google Assistant, and Apple’s Siri. But are they new? Not really – Voice Assistants came around in the last decade, slowly becoming recognized as more of an ‘everything’ device rather than for specific needs. They can carry out over hundreds of third party commands.
Virtual Assistant for Your Home
You would find that voice assistants are built into their own smart speakers. Like the Amazon Echo featuring Alexa, the Nest Mini or Nest Audio with Google Assistant, and Apple HomeKit for Siri. But just in case you didn’t realize already, they have long been featured in our smartphones – iPhones and Androids to begin with.
With the introduction of iPhones, Siri was like your phone software that you could communicate with – to dial up someone from your contact list as you drive, or play something from your music playlist on your phone. Fast forward to now, several Apple devices including that of Apple TV’s remote and Apple HomeKit feature Siri, allowing you to carry out a multitude of tasks. You can pick up where you left off on your Netflix show just by communicating with your Apple TV remote.
In the same way, smart speakers enable you to carry out voice enabled commands to any connected device, whether it is your home lighting, the Smart TV, or even just any smart kitchen appliance for that matter. In fact, finding a smart thermostat Alexa compatible has never been easier either. Even the Google Nest Learning Thermostat is compatible with Alexa apart from its very own Google Assistant.
What Can Voice Assistants Do
If you’ve reached up to this point in the article, you probably understand that voice assistants can assist with several home tasks. Here’s a much detailed breakdown as to what they can actually do.
While your voice assistant cannot literally hold the door ajar for you, if paired to a smart lock system voice assistants can lock and unlock doors by a simple voice command – so you won’t have to drop whatever it is that you are doing and your guest can instead see themselves in. And just like that, voice assistants allow you to access and operate multiple devices within your home that are connected to it.
Other than operating other devices, voice assistants have the ability to conduct internet searches for you. Now you can vocally look up the recipe of something that you’re trying to cook in the kitchen and have it read out to you instead of grabbing your laptop or phone and surfing through the web. In the same way, voice assistants when connected to your smartphones can answer or place calls as you say so, and even read out and type texts and emails on your behalf. You can also check in on weather forecasts, and set up a virtual calendar with reminders for yourself.
There’s a lot that voice assistants are helpful with, including navigation systems too. In some car navigation systems there is a software that speaks back, telling you when to take that turn up ahead. So it is not only that voice assistants are helpful when confined to our homes, but rather they are helpful pretty much everywhere we go because you would find that they are installed in different things, for different purposes.
What Is The Overall Benefit?
Now that you’re aware of what all voice assistants can do and where they are usually found installed in, the question is how is this actually beneficial for us? Or is it just this extra factor of convenience that allows us to kick back and vocally control things around our home?
Voice Assistants are what can actually contribute to a convenient and energy efficient lifestyle. Voice enabled control leaves no room for carelessness. You can switch off lights, turn down the thermostat in order to avoid energy wastage. Similarly, they also serve as in inexpensive means of automating your home. When you have remote control access and voice enabled control to certain devices and appliances within your home, your home becomes a smart one.
You can easily find a plethora of smart home devices that are voice assistant compatible on FirstEnergy Home’s website. Log onto www.firstenergyhome.com today and browse through their Smart Home catalogue. You’ll find several smart speakers as well as other smart devices that are not only affordable, but those that would fit right into your home!
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