Google, Alexa and Siri at smartenlight.com

Alexa Routines 2022: Create Your Personal, Helpful Voice Assistant

Alexa Routines 2022: Alexa detecting Crying babies, barking dogs, coughing, snoring, appliance beeping and water sounds

There’s this one area where Alexa continuously and rapidly learns new tricks: Alexa Routines. Years ago, we found only a handful of actions in our Alexa app and could initially not even automate our music. Nowadays, we can find 8 activations – with many variations – and 25(!) different actions in the Alexa app.  With … Read more

iOS 14 – A Siri, HomeKit, Home App and Shortcuts Overview

iOS 14 is here, and over 30% of us have already updated. Time to update our Siri, HomeKit, Home app, and Shortcuts overview with the new iOS 14 features. In this post, we will start with a brief overview of the Shortcuts and the Home app and where they intersect. We’ll then look into HomeKit … Read more

Google Routines: Immersive Storytelling with Ambient Scenes and Sounds

Google is an amazing storyteller! We will look into the many ways to listen to his stories, but this post is actually about quality time with your kids, your partner, or yourself. We will create Google Routines, where he will magically set the perfect ambience to put us in the middle of the story we … Read more

Siri’s HomeKit Scenes and Shortcuts: Immersive Storytelling

We need to ask her many times, and if we are lucky, Siri will tell us the one and only story she knows: her own story. Just in case you’re not so lucky, you can find it – captured in a tweet – towards the end of this post. So, Siri seems not to be our … Read more

Alexa Routines: Immersive Storytelling with Ambient Scenes and Sounds

There are many ways to turn Alexa into a storyteller. We’ll look into some of them, but this post is actually about quality time with your kids, your partner, or yourself. We will create an Alexa Routine, where Alexa magically, on cue, sets the perfect ambience to put us in the middle of the story … Read more

Google Routines: How to Automate your Life with Google Assistant

It started years ago with shortcuts, then came Google’s ready-made routines. Nowadays, we can create custom routines just by entering any Google Assistant command or by choosing from 20 popular actions. Google Routines are one of the helpful features of our voice assistant, which allow us to automate many aspects of our smart home and … Read more

“Hey Siri, Start my Music Quiz” – Create your own Music Game with Shortcuts!

So, we were preparing a lengthy, and – compared to this post – a bit boring, but still quite helpful overview of Siri’s Shortcuts and the Home app (it’s already here: iOS 14 – A Siri, HomeKit, Home App and Shortcuts Overview). And while we were playing around with the Shortcuts app, trying to find … Read more