Gadgetory

I like binging as much as the next person but wouldn't it be nice if you could launch all of your smart home entertainment needs with a single voice command now you can do exactly that with the Logitech Harmony Alexa skill I was dying to try this out so we brought the Logitech Harmony hub here to the C net smart apartment along with a Roku streaming stick and plenty of smart home gadget if you've got Philips hue bulbs in the lamps a lifx bulb in the corner lamp there my goal is to integrate all of it into a single movie watching mode that I can launch with a single voice command here's what it looks like Alexa turn on watch Hulu okay so you can see the roku jumps right to the Hulu input the TV's on the right place it needs to be and even the lights here go green kind of match the Hulu theme I did this for every streaming service that we've got here Hulu and Amazon Netflix HBO GO all with a single voice command now as you can see the end result is really cool but there's still a lot of pain points here the Logitech app is really confusing it's very powerful it does a lot of cool things for all your entertainment gear but the different settings and options you need to enable to get things working or kind of scattered about unintuitive lead you have to search to find stuff it takes a lot of getting used to there's a learning curve here not the most well laid out app I also encountered a lot of pain points as I tried to import my logitech activities and favorite channels into Alexa what it's basically doing is tricking Alexa into thinking that those activities and channels are just devices so you tell Alexa to turn them on and off you can also add what logitech calls friendly names these are alternative wordings for your commands the problem is that the logitech presets that you can't get rid of kind of take up all the good words there's already turn on HBO turn on Netflix turn on your TV those are already locked in so if you want to make a really cool HBO preset that has purple lights or whatever you want you can't do that with the built-in preset you have to make your own I don't like that at all on top of that the Logitech skill can't do everything yet you can't adjust the volume of your entertainment gear and you can't fast-forward or rewind either so you're just stuck turning things on and off and switching inputs all in all I think this is a pretty compelling use of Alexa I just wish that it wasn't quite so clunky to set up I'm also waiting to see if we get additional Alexa skills for TV avy gear in 2017 maybe an Alexa enable TV set or deeper controls of Amazon fire TV all of that has me personally waiting before buying a harmony hub which is not an inexpensive purchase that's said I'm glad we've got it here in the scene that smart apartment where we can keep playing with it and testing it out