- Welcome back to another Tip and Trick Tuesday.
That's when it's a Tuesday and I do a tip and a trick.
Today's, more specifically, is gonna be something
that I actually think is kinda fun,
it's a way to create custom voice commands
for Google Home and any of your Echo devices.
Voice assistants are actually super helpful.
You can have them tell you the weather in the morning,
they can set timers while you cook,
you can put them into infinite loops for your own enjoyment,
tons of things.
But if you really think about it,
they have a very limited set of commands.
Now, short of developing an app
that uses these voice assistants and APIs,
which I don't recommend you do,
unless you really want to, knock yourself out.
It's gonna be hard.
But, short of that, there's not really that easy of a way
to make the Google assistant or the Alexa
do the things that you want just by telling them.
Except that If This Then That exists.
IFTTT, if this then that, is a popular program
that allows you to create triggers and actions
with an easy to use UI for popular services and platforms.
And in this case, they have both Amazon Alexa
and Google Assistant triggers ready to go
and it's just really easy.
For either device, first download the If This Then app
from your app store, either IOS or Android, doesn't matter,
and create an account.
It's free.
Once in the app, we're gonna tap on search,
then you can either type in Alexa or Google Assistant
depending on which one you wanna set up,
and tap one and it'll show you a bunch of applets.
Now the applets are basically triggers and actions
already packaged together for you to just use and install.
Think of them like, basically apps that can control things.
With one trigger and one action.
You can also though, create your own applet from scratch.
So, tap on the applet icon at the bottom right,
tap the plus icon at the top right,
choose Alexa or Google Assistant if you want them
to be the trigger.
I.E. you say a custom phrase to them
and then they trigger an action.
Or you can use other triggers in If This Then That
to then make the Google Home or Echo do an action instead,
but this is a bit of a rabbit hole for this video
so I'm just gonna focus on creating custom voice commands
to trigger the Google Home and the Alexa
to then do other things.
If you want though, go ahead an explore,
check out all the applets that are already made
that work both directions
and you'll be sure to lose a weekend
but knock yourself out.
Now once you have whatever the phrase is that you want,
in all lowercase, by the way,
you can select the that part of the applet,
and then search for the device service that you want to use.
For this example, I'll have Alexa turn my lights
a different color.
So I searched for Philips Hue,
which is the smart bulbs that I have.
Yes I know that you can make Alexa do this anyway,
but you'll see.
For any services you haven't set up though,
you'll have to connect them by logging into those accounts
for each one.
So your Philips Hue account, you have to log into.
Your Nest account, et cetera, et cetera,
just so it can access all of their functions.
So I selected to change my bedroom red.
It grabs the room names and bulbs automatically
after you connect the account, by the way.
Then I select finish and it'll show it as an active applet.
You can turn these off and on,
you can edit them and delete them
from the my applet section at the bottom right
whenever you need to in the future, by the way.
Alexa, trigger sexy time.
- [Alexa] Sending that to IFTTT.
- Then you just kinda repeat this
for any of the other actions that you want
and any other phrases that you wanna make, et cetera.
Now, of course, If This Then That is, like I said,
a bit of a rabbit hole.
You can make it do a ton of other things.
Like, when you get home with your Android phone,
make it turn on the lights and do this and play music.
Rabbit hole.
Go ahead and enjoy that.
For this video in particular, again,
I'm just focusing on creating custom phrases
because I think it opens up just a lot more commands
that you can give to these voice assistants
and you can make any number of these things
do any number of things.
I'd be interested to see what you guys end up having it do.
Let me know in the comments below.
We love to hear from you.
Otherwise, if you like this video,
please let me know about that in the comments below,
again, we'd like to hear about it.
And then also this series of tips and tricks
every Tuesday and how you feel about that
and suggestions for other tips and tricks.
I wanna hear a lot from you guys.
Sorry.
I hope you enjoyed that, if you did,
please thumbs up it or share it.
Also subscribe to the channel, all of that
is greatly appreciated.
And, as always, regardless, thanks for watching.