With Alexa Hunches, you won’t forget things like turning off lights at night, locking the front door when you are away from home, or adjust the thermostat before you go to bed.
Amazon Alexa has never stopped helping users establish an easier and more efficient home. As it has released the Energy Dashboard feature, which is committed to further tracking the energy consumption of home appliances to save the electricity bills for users based on building a smart and simple home. Today, this article will walk you through another new feature – Alexa Hunches, that can now control your smart home devices proactively without having to ask Alexa assistant, for instance, it can automatically turn off the light that is accidentally left on based on your past usage habits and patterns when you are away or asleep.
What is Alexa Hunches?
This is a great addition of Alexa, called proactive hunches. Its proactivity reflects in making Alexa actively help you complete the tasks that you may have forgotten without having to ask permission. When the proactive hunches is enabled, you can change their status according to your usage history of smart home devices that Alexa will skip asking for permission for a task and directly help perform it. What’s more, Alexa can automatically act on hunches for you.
Alexa hunches is compatible with a variety of smart home devices, like lights, switches, thermostats, locks and plugs. More devices like water heaters, smart vacuums to come soon. Supported SONOFF devices include SONOFF S31 Wi-Fi smart plug, POWR2 Wi-Fi smart switch with energy monitoring, IW100/IW101 Wi-Fi smart socket & switch.
How to set up hunches in Alexa app?
Hunches are enabled by default in Alexa, where you can have three options. “Hunches suggestions” means Alexa will notify you when you have a hunch. The “Mobile notifications” indicates Alexa will send a mobile notification if you have a hunch when enabled. If you want Alexa to act on hunches without needing to ask, you need to have “Automatic actions” enabled. For example, Alexa can proactively take actions to turn the light off when you have a hunch that no one is home or you are asleep.
How to turn hunches for smart devices on or off?
1. Launch Alexa app.
2. Go to “More” and select “Settings”.
3. Scroll down and select “Hunches”.
4. Tap the “Setting” icon on the right corner.
5. Under “Hunches suggestions”, turn ON or OFF the hunch notification.
How to set Alexa to act on hunches?
1. Access “HUNCHES” page and select “AUTOMATIC ACTIONS”.
2. Tap “Lights”, you can select “turn off the lights if you’re asleep or away.”
3. Under “DEVICES”, go to “Lights” to add more lights for all hunches automatic actions. Before adding, you may notice there is a prompt that plugs and switches will only appear if their type is set to “light”, just follow this prompt to do. (SONOFF S31 is taken as an example to add.)
Also, you can enable “Mobile notifications” to make Alexa send a mobile notification if she has a hunch.
Hunches make Alexa more useful to provide efficiency and convenience for your existing smart home. With Hunches, Alexa now can help anticipate your wants and proactively address them, avoid you forgetting to manage home appliances.
Similarly, Alexa hunch is only available in the US now.
