Amazon Alexa is a great smart home assistant for communication and convenience, it also has cost-saving benefits, With certain features and settings, Alexa can actually save you money.
There are several ways a smart home can save you money, but when it comes to Alexa specifically, you can leverage the assistant to cut down on utility bills.
Here’s how to save money with two distinct Alexa features, Routines and Hunches.
How to save money with Alexa routines
An Alexa smart home routine is basically an automation that can be triggered by either a voice command, specific action of a smart home device or a pre-assigned schedule.
How to save money with Alexa Hunches
Hunches is still considered a newer feature, but it’s easily one of the best Alexa skills for having an intuitive home. Alexa Hunches are automatically enabled by default, meaning the smart assistant will notify you when a smart home device isn’t in its usual state. However, allowing Alexa to automatically act on the things it spots cuts out the middle-man (you) and saves you energy on the fly.
For instance, Alexa will often send us one of its Hunches about our smart lights after we’ve kicked off our nighttime routine. If we didn’t want to deal with this notification ourselves, we can get Alexa to automatically act on this by enabling the mode in settings.
To do so, go to the ‘Hunches’ section in the Alexa app’s settings, and then follow the instructions on the ‘Automatic Actions’ tab. You’ll get the option to choose which kind of Hunches you want it to act on, and which ones you don’t such as tampering with the heating.
This feature is only available in the US at the moment.
