Making Your Smart Home "Work Smarter"

Smart homes and smart devices are all the rage. They can make your life much simpler. Change the temperature in your house, unlock your door, turn on lights, view live video from a security camera and much more all from your phone. However, there's one major deficiency. Each device or set of devices is managed through a different app.

Searching for the right app to manage your device can be challenging. Which app is it? Where is the app on my phone? If you're like me and invested in several smart devices it an be very frustrating. So, I set out on a journey to figure out how to integrate everything into one easy app.

I quickly settled on using a voice assistant, in my case Alexa, but I'm sure Google Home and others will work. Not all smart devices integrate directly with the voice assistant. After some research I found this handy app called Simple Commands which will integrate almost any smart device using multiple different protocols and it also connects seamlessly with your voice assistant app.

After about 15-20 minutes, I had all of my smart devices connected to Alexa. So, either from my phone or an Alexa device I can give commands to manage any of my smart home products. While the smart home ecosystem remains fragmented, with a little you can make your smart home a great deal smarter!