Setting up a smart home only to be able to switch your lights on and off from your phone isn’t the most efficient use of your time and resources. Still, with the appropriate hardware and applications, you can create some routines that will wow your family, friends, and occasional Airbnb visitors. And you won’t need the best smart home tech for this!
Here are our top five picks.
#1. Make sure your lights are in sync with your movies.
If you have smart lights, you may change color and brightness in response to movies and TV programs. The result is quite impressive, and it may be the perfect finishing touch for your home cinema area.
It’s also not difficult to do—all you need is the smart light sync program for Windows or macOS, which is available for free. This arrangement does come with one caveat: Your films must be watched on a computer (or a computer connected to a television) for the application to recognize what’s on-screen and cycle your lights appropriately.
#2. When you leave home, turn everything off.
The finest smart home tricks should operate like magic, and you can set all your smart home gear to react to you leaving the house by using the location triggers provided in the free online service IFTTT (If This Then That). Reduce the temperature, make sure the lights are turned off, and so on.
Many smart home services have geofencing, but we like IFTTT since it integrates with so many different services and gadgets, ensuring that nothing is left on that shouldn’t be. You must have the IFTTT app for Android or iOS installed for IFTTT to know where you are.
#3. When making phone calls, use your voice.
When you can utter a command into thin air and make a call with nothing but your voice, you know you’re in the future (touchscreens were so last century). You can accomplish this right now, with just a few minutes of setup time, thanks to devices like the Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Apple Home Pod.
Assuming you’ve set up Google Home, connected it to your Google account, installed the Google Home app on your phone, and enabled personalization—full steps here—you may then contact someone in your Google Contacts list by just saying “call…” followed by their name (you can also just speak out the number).
#4. Get notified when the children return home.
Setting up your smart home, so you know when your children return from school is quite handy and not complicated. It relieves you of the stress about where they are, relieves them of the burden of messaging you after each school day, and it’s simple to adjust to your own home schedule.
#5. Display your security camera on a large screen.
Peering at the video from your security camera on your phone is OK. Still, to get adequate information, you’ll need to get it up on a large screen—with the additional benefit of being able to rapidly switch between security cameras while you’re sitting on the couch watching TV.
You may even have the stream running in the background while you’re doing something else, so you don’t miss the delivery person.
