Gadgetory

you ever have trouble falling asleep happens to me all the time and seemingly on the nights when I need the rest the most then I became seen that's resident lightbulb guy and I started testing smart lights out of my home and I discovered that setting the lights to gradually fade out as I was drifting off will help ease me into a better night's rest now there are plenty of smart lights that you can schedule to fade out at a specific time but most of us don't go to bed at the same time every night the better way is to program a simple voice command that you can say while crawling into bed to trigger that slow fade here's how to do it first let's make sure that you've got the right gadgets for voice control you're gonna need either an Alexa or a Google assistant enabled device an Amazon echo dot or Google home mini on your nightstand should do the trick you'll also need some help from the free online automation service IFFT which stands for if this then that if we give our assistant the right command then the lights should slowly fade out got it good next up is the bulbs we're gonna need one that has an IFFT channel that lets us customize the duration of our lighting changes really slow them down for that that narrows our options down quite a bit we're gonna go with the life Xcel Edie now it's time to start connecting everything on it to do that we're gonna download the IFFT app to our Android or iOS device and then create a free account once you've done that go to its list of supported services and search for life expand for the voice assistant that you'll be using activate each channel using your respective login info for each service and you'll be good to go all that's left now is to make the IFFT applet that's going to make all of this work to do so you're going to tap the little plus icon in the if tap and then follow the instructions to put the pieces of your automation recipe into place remember if you give a specific voice command then we want the lights to fade out so the voice command is the first part you'll actually get some extra customization options if you go with Google but for our purposes let's go with Alexa show you how it's done we're gonna select say a specific phrase is the trigger with Alexa that phrase will come after the words Alexa trigger so let's use the phrase asleep fade that makes our full command Alexa rigorously fade now for the lights let's select the life exchange the important thing here is that unlike a lot of other lighting channels on if life exceed duration for your lighting changes so we're gonna set that to 45 minutes and now when you say Alexa trigger asleep fade she'll tell if to tell our light bulb to fade out for 45 minutes and that's it try it for yourself and you'll be enjoying a smarter night's sleep in no time