Hey YouTube, I'm Tristan from Smart
Home Point. One of the features I like on
the Echo Show is the ability to actually
change your lights
directly on the touch screen, This... the
moment I knew about this feature, it made
me wonder whether it's as good as
(you see) the demos of Home Assistant
where people actually have floor plans,
and they go on to it and they control
light bulbs throughout their house via
that.
Uhm, I know I should say "wait till the end
to find out the answer..." but
no, to be honest, the feature - the light
control feature on the Echo Show - isn't
as good
as that, if I'm honest, but nonetheless
it's quite useful to turn your light
bulbs on and off and do one or two other
things on the Echo Show,
so I wanted to run down all the
functionality that you can do on the
Echo Show: let's take a look!
Okay so to actually access the light
bulb functionality you need to swipe
in from the right, click on smart home up
here,
and you've basically got different devices.
Uhm, your different smart devices.
So you could actually go into camera and
go into a particular - you know - camera,
or you can go to lights or - as you've
seen before - it'll just give you your
most recent
smart home lights as well. Uhm, I'll just
go to the actual lights
section. So I've got that... right, so as you
can see
all your different bulbs that have been
imported via the Alexa app,
they're showing up here. It'll show you
whether they're nine percent brightness
or 100% brightness, if they're on or off.
Uou can see if some bulbs are off, it'll
say there's an error occurred.
Uhm...
yeah, so you can just go through and see
different bulbs there. Now for example,
I'm in my study.
So what I can do is click on [and] off... and you
won't actually see any difference, but
the light bulb
which - I'll move this now -
the main light is now off. If I go back
and click that again...
a bit of a delay... and the light is on.
Equally you can go into a particular
bulb by clicking it, and you can alter
the brightness as well.
So go all the way down to seven percent,
and you can see it's - you know - very dim
now.
I don't really need the bulb on at all
because it's good good amount of
daylight...
let's put all the way up to 100 again. So
you can go back.
I've also got a group here. So in the Hue
app, I've actually created a zone
of two different groups [bulbs]. Obviously
that'll show up here. What it'll allow me
to do is come in...
this is one of the two lights in that
group...
so click on off and it'll turn it off,
and click on will turn on, and obviously
I can
mess around with the brightness as well,
and as you can see it
kicks in almost instantly. It's not like
you've got minutes of delay,
so you can control things via rooms,
via groups and the individual bulb as
well.
So that's pretty useful. As I originally
found out when I created my Hue system,
as per another video you actually have
to name
your groups - or your rooms - differently to
the bulbs otherwise
the Alexa app gets confused on import,
and that's why I've got things like
office type room bulb that refers to the
Hue bulb,
and then study which is the actual room
that controls that. So this particular
smart home is - the...
you know, interface on the Echo Show - is
the same
as on the Alexa app, in the sense you get
all the duplicates here.
But that isn't actually a bad thing
because you also get the multiple zones
so you can control multiple lights via
this.
But of course one of the things you
might be wondering is: how can you change
the color of bulbs?
All I've actually shown is how to change
a bulb on and off, and how to change the
brightness.
This - which is two lamps - this is actually
a white ambience bulb
that's in here, which means you can
change the color between blues
and yellows and everything in between. Uhm,
there's - I think -
tens or over ten thousand different
colors you can choose in the Hue app,
and then there's a massive five colors
you can choose in the Alexa app
for this particular type of bulb! But
unfortunately on the touchscreen
you can't do anything at all. All you can
do is turn it
on and off, and change the brightness up
and down,
unfortunately, and that's true of any
color - you know RGB - smart bulbs. You can't
actually change them whatsoever on this
Echo Show touch screen, unfortunately. All
you can do is turn bulbs on and off,
and dim the brightness. One thing you can
do though, which is a bit of a compromise,
is if you come back to this menu, you can
actually play routines via the
touchscreen. So ones you've created on
the Alexa app,
such as the ones down here, you can
actually kick those off,
and that's quite useful because if
you've got - you know - maybe a routine
when you're leaving the house
or last thing at night, you can actually
come into here really easily, just swipe
out...
go to routines... and you can actually kick
off a routine here.
So for example I have one that says "good
night" which will actually
turn off bulbs. So if I can just play
that here,
and that'll now turn off that bulb and
do everything else in that routine as
well.
So it's quite nice you've got that
functionality,
but obviously you can't play scenes on
this,
and you can't change the color so things
are limited to
literally turning bulbs on and off,
changing the brightness and kicking off
routines.
Okay so that wraps up today's video. As
you can see, the functionality
is a bit limited on the Echo Show, even
if you've gone out and spend a fortune
on color bulbs throughout your house
and those... really different types of
smart bulbs and smart lighting...
you get very limited control on the Echo
show devices,
unfortunately, which is a pity but
hopefully Amazon can
look to improve this in the future. It
would also be nice if you can actually
kick off scenes via the touchscreen as
well, instead of just through your voice,
but at least you do have that voice
control as a backup, and obviously this
has the voice control built in as well
so it's not too bad.
Okay I hope you liked this video. If you
did, please click the thumbs up button
and don't forget to subscribe.
Thank you!