The Amazon Alexa Skill for AFRISOhome

What are Amazon Echo and Alexa?

With Echo, Amazon offers a loudspeaker with voice control that can be connected to AFRISOhome and that lets you control your smart home devices such as lamps, thermostats, power outlet etc. by means of simple voice commands.
Alexa is the “brain” of Amazon Echo. Alexa learns on an ongoing basis and is automatically updated. Alexa gets used to your way of speaking, your vocabulary and your preferences and improves on an ongoing basis.

This is what Alexa can do for you in addition to your Smart Home control

Easy setup

Controlling your smart home via Amazon Echo requires just a few simple preliminary steps:

  1. Activate the AFRISOhome Alexa Skill for your Amazon Echo, Echo Plus, Echo Dot or Echo Show.
  2. After activation, the Skill is connected to AFRISOhome. You can remove this connection at any time.
  3. Alexa finds your smart home devices connected to the AFRISOhome gateway directly in the Skill or by means of the voice command “Alexa, discover my devices”.
  4. Alexa automatically adds all devices, PROgrams and groups that can be controlled via Echo.
  5. Done. From now on, you can control AFRISOhome by means of voice commands.

This is what you can do:

Already today, you can control numerous devices with the Skill for your AFRISOhome:

  • Turn on or off devices which have a “switch” (DE, US & UK)
  • Set devices which can be “dimmed” to a specific percentage or increase/reduce the value by n percent (DE, US & UK)
  • Set devices which can have a “position” to a specific percentage or increase/reduce the value by n percent (DE, US & UK)
  • Set devices with a “setpoint temperature” to a specific degree or increase/reduce the temperature by n degrees (DE, US & UK)
  • Query the setpoint temperature of devices with a “setpoint temperature” (US & UK)
  • Query the temperature of devices with a “temperature” (US & UK)
  • Set devices with a “colour temperature” to a specific value or increase/reduce the value (DE, US & UK)
  • Set devices with a “colour” to a specific value (DE, US & UK)
  • Query the lock status or lock devices with a “lock” (DE, US & UK)
  • Display the live stream of cameras on Echo devices (US)

Amazon Echo currently supports a number of functions only in individual languages; however, Amazon will make them available in German as soon as possible. In order to make these functions available to you as quickly as possible, our team is already developing them in English (US & UK).

Additional functions of the AFRISOhome Skill:

In addition to the possibilities to control your smart home devices by means of voice commands, AFRISOhome offers further advantages in the Alexa Skill:

Convenient "turning on" and "turning off" of complete PROgrams

For example, the command "Alexa, turn on movie mode" does not only start the TV, but also dims the lights, closes the roller blinds and correctly switches on the audio system so you do not have to do all of this separately.

Control devices in a group with a single command

You can switch off the lights in the house in a single go with the command "Alexa, turn off the lights". This switches off all devices of the "lamp" type. This also works with individual rooms, roller blinds or device types.

Define convenient invocation names

You can assign an "invocation name" per device, PROgram and group. This way, you can assign descriptive names or several invocation names (invocation name: "living room, living room light") – this way, you can talk intuitively to Alexa.

Directly to the AFRISOhome Alexa Skill

The AFRISOhome Skill is free and can be activated directly at Amazon.