the Amazon echo flex is one of the newest devices from Amazon with their
voice assistant Alexa onboard and it is quite the unique little device so today I'm
going to give you nine different ways that it can become very powerful and is
quite the amazing little device in your smart home hello Automators thanks for
tuning in again I'm Brian from automate your life and today I'm going to take
the frustration out of automation by showing you all about this great little
device from Amazon it's just that little bit of difference that allows you to use
this as a very powerful component in your smart home now the echo flex is $25
u.s. and you can buy a couple of different components for about $15 us
and less they're on sale and this one's a motion sensor and there's also a
different color light that you can attach and I'm sure as we see kind of
going forward there will be new additions to what this device can have
attached to it all in all that makes it a $40 device and this gives you a ton of
capability as well just having the little speaker onboard amazon's voice
assistant and the fact that you can attach these other things now there are
ways to extend this and that's what this video is all about so let's walk through
some of those different ways with this motion detector you simply click it in
plug it into a wall and then you can utilize it within the routines function
of your Amazon voice assistant application to sense people moving
throughout your home or in a space and you can use this to trigger on lighting
that you would like to see now what I've done is I've connected it to Philips hue
I've connected the voice assistant to Philips hue and it is a very quick
response time here in my smart home it's almost instantaneous with this setup and
Philips hue and that has made it incredibly powerful
now with this motion sensor attached you can actually use this to log moment
movement throughout a home now I think this has great applications for those of
you that are taking care of either your parents or your grandparents or your
taking care of someone that's maybe struggling a little bit if you go ahead
and you connect to if this than that this is a new thing within the routine
service in Amazon's voice assistant application there they actually allow
you to go ahead and trigger and if this then that applets and what I've done
with that is connected it to Google sheets and just creating a new row every
time motion sensing is triggered now if you have multiple multiple of these
throughout your home then you can actually create a really complex logging
and see when the normal movements are throughout a space get notifications to
a smart phone or a tablet and then also have that full log you can also manage
other smart devices that have been connected into the application now that
means smart plugs or smart switches or things like cameras and I have the smart
things camera in my home and I've connected smart things directly to
Amazon's voice assistant Alexa and this has meant that I can turn on that camera
whenever I'd like one of the most powerful integrations is that smart
things integration and the reason I say that is you can use something called a
virtual switch so let's say that you had this motion sensor trigger and what's
not possible right now with Amazon's application is you can't use multiple
conditions you can also use a condition for the time and day but you can't use
other conditions or other situations within your home to trigger automation
and smart things can do that now what you can do is you can use the motion
sensor trigger to actually turn on a virtual switch that then goes into smart
things and is used to drive really complex automations within your smart
home so for an example there you could test that your alarm system is on at the
same time as this motion sensor has seen something go on and when you do that you
can decide what to then do maybe you want to turn on a recording from a
camera connected to that system or maybe you want to trigger a siren or you know
you have all these different options that you can go ahead and use within
that smart thing system now before I go too far you've probably seen something
already that's kind of tweaked your mind and I'd like to hear how you plan to use
the echo flex or how you're already using it in your smart home so leave
that comment down below now let's go back to simple because we're getting
complex there and I think it's really simple to see how this can be pathway
lighting and if you had multiple of these you can actually use any of them
to trigger on pathway lighting throughout your home so this is a simple
motion sensor on one of them and then pathway lighting throughout your home as
you move along a space you can also just use the attachment that is lighting and
is a multicolored light to actually just light up at a specific time at night so
that you always have a light on in a room say like a bathroom you can use
that light attachment as a multi colored light to indicate conditions going on in
your smart home so if you have other motion sensors that are triggered on or
you have reminders that you want to get a specific notice for at a specific time
number one you can trigger a little audio notification but you can also
change the color of the light to say red until that condition goes away so they
can be very powerful to give you reminders in a bit of a different way
than the normal reminder system that you have through Amazon's voice assistant
what's really important about this device as well is the design of it and
this allows you to put it in dirty dusty or even damp environments and not really
worry like you do with some of these other cloth based products and I think
this is something that Amazon has been missing for a little while within their
system but this brings it to a point where you can go ahead put this in a
garage or put this in a bathroom and not really worry about the device failing or
looking terrible and it's also very easy to clean up now we're going to start
talking about some of the ways you can attach this
other devices I have a couple of things for you number one the USB power port
here it can't be controlled before you ask you can't turn it on and off based
on automation but it does pass through USB power so you can stick a phone
charger and attach it to this or you can attach like a USB based sensor or a USB
based camera or a lot of smart home devices are now powered by that now this
is 1.5 amps so you're not going to be able to power something huge with that
but you can pass through power on this device and therefore your outlet can
still have three devices on it your full outlet set up there to be honest this
speaker is not going to be something that you're going to be blown away by
it's small it's kind of high treble and it's really not intended to be something
that you're playing music with but with that 3.5 millimeter output in the
Bluetooth connectivity you can connect to a lot of different speakers and have
that be the speaker that is used with this device you can use something much
more powerful much better sounding and still have the full access to Amazon's
voices system so that's nine different ways that you can go ahead and use the
echo flex and have it become something very powerful in your smart home now if
you'd like to know all of the other new features that Amazon has put out we
always create these videos for Amazon their voice assistant their fire TV
system and it just shows you all of the latest from them so go ahead click that
that link to that video is up on screen right now otherwise guys thanks for
watching and of course don't hate automate