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– Are you looking to start
automating your smart home but just aren't sure where to start? Well, don't worry about it because in today's video, we're gonna be covering three
easy smart home routines for beginners, so stay tuned. (upbeat music) Hi everybody, welcome
back to another video. My name is Steve from the YouTube channel, Steve Does, and I wanna thank you for joining me here @reviews.org. So there's a pretty good chance that one of these guys right here has snuck into your house. These are the Amazon Echo Dots. We've got the 3rd gen and
the new 4th gen one here. But are you utilizing them
to their full potential? Now, my experience is that most people ask it to play music, maybe ask for the weather, but other than that, that's pretty much it. But there is so much more you can do with these devices, as far as controlling your smart home.

And that is going to
be setting up routines. Now routines are essentially setting up a bunch of commands into one command. So for example, if I
want to say play music and then I also say turn on the lights, and then I also say adjust the thermostat, and I can also say maybe lock the door. Now it's gonna take me a while to go through the steps for each one, asking each individual
one from these devices. But I can set up one
routine that potentially is, good morning or start my day, and it's going to run through all four of those things for me.

So I don't have to do them individually. That is how we're going
to set up automation on these devices. And I'm gonna show you three easy routines that we can set up in today's video. But before we get started, don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification bell, so you don't miss out on a
future videos like this one. With that said, let's get started. All right, because this
is a beginner video, we're gonna start out with
something pretty simple, and that is a good morning routine.

Now with a good morning routine, you could do things like
wake up to an alarm or music, turn your smart lights on, adjust your smart thermostat, start the coffee, and also get a news briefing. Now keep in mind to run
all of these commands, we do need additional smart home products, whether it be smart lighting, smart plugs, smart thermostats. These do have to be
devices that do connect with your Amazon Alex devices. But once you get all of those
integrated into these devices, you can set up routines like that. In fact, I'm gonna show you guys a demo of setting up a good morning routine. So what we're gonna do is
we're going to grab our phones, I'm gonna load up my Amazon
Alexa app right here.

In the very bottom right corner we see the more option, so I'm gonna click onto that. And then it looks like the fifth one down we see routines. So I'm gonna go ahead
and click on routines, and most likely these are going to be
mostly blank for you, these are ones that I've created myself. But in the very top right corner, we see the plus sign, we'll go ahead and click on the plus sign. So here we are going to
create our first routine.

I'm gonna go ahead and
enter a name for my routine. So it's gonna be, good morning. I'm gonna click on the next button, we're gonna say when this happens. So for me, I want my good
morning routine to start when my alarm goes off. So I'm gonna click on
schedule up in the top, I'm gonna say at a time, let's do it five days this week, we'll say at a time. And I want mine to go off
when I wake up in the morning, so we'll say 5:30 am is when this is going to kick off. So we have that set, I'm gonna click next again, so we've got the time set, now we're going to pick our actions. So we're gonna click on actions, and the first thing
that I want it to do is I want it to tell me some good news.

So we're gonna click on a good news, click on next, so it's gonna wake me up to that. We're gonna click on the add action again, and I'm gonna scroll down all the way towards a smart home. So tap on smart home. I'm gonna click on it lights, and I'm gonna go down to the light that I have next to my bed,
which is the Phillips Hue light, actually Phillips Hue 2 is on my side.

And I'll click next again, click on power, I want it to power on, and brightness, I want it to start at 0% and slowly ramp up over, we'll say 10 minutes here. So it's slowly gonna get brighter over the first 10 minutes
of that alarm going off. Now what I want it to do, I'll go ahead and click
on the plus sign again. I want it to also turn on
the heater in my house. So I'm gonna go back
down here to smart home. Up at the very top it says, "All devices," right above lights. I'm gonna click on all devices and I'm gonna go to my Ecobee thermostat. So what I want it to do is I want it to adjust my thermostat to about 74 is where we like
it at in the morning. So we're gonna adjust 70, 75 looks good. I'm gonna click on next, so we also have that adjusted and then let's say I want it
to also start my coffee pot, and I have my coffee pot
plugged into a smart plug.

So we're gonna click
on plus one more time, I'm gonna go down to smart home again, all devices, and let's see. I've got my Wyze kitchen light down. Here, we're gonna say I just want it to turn my smart plug on, which is then going to
start to my coffee pot. So I've got all of that setup. Oh, and one more thing, once it runs through that routine I also want it to start playing music.

So, let's go to music and podcasts. Let's go ahead and just say top 40. So we'll say play top 40 music for me, click on next again. And it is going to run
through in this order that I have set up. If I want to adjust order, so let's say I want it to play the music before it reads me my good news, I can adjust that by the two dashes that I see on either side. So for good news, I see the
two dashes on the right. I'm gonna click on a hold on that, and it's going to allow
me to adjust the order of this routine. But I want it to play me
the news before my music, so that all looks good to me. Look up at the top, starting at 5:30 am, choose the device that I want. So I want it to use my Echo Show 5, 'cause that's the one
that's right next to my bed.

So it's gonna play all of
that stuff from that device. And then I'm just gonna click on save, routine successfully saved.
So we have it all right there. If you look at the very top
where it says, good morning, if I want to test it out, I can go ahead and click
on the play button. I'm just gonna run
through all of that stuff on my device, and get it all set up. So now that you have an idea of how to set up a routine and what is involved with it, let me go ahead and give
you two other options for routines that you can set up. All right, the next easy
routine that you can set up is leaving for work. So your phone can also
be a geolocation device. And what that means is it's going to track where your phone is located, and if you go outside a small
perimeter around your house, it's going to notice that, and it's going to say
you've left the house and trigger certain things to happen.

So if we take a look
at what I have set up, I'm still in my routines menu, third one down from the top, I've got Steve's device leaving the house. Let me go ahead and click on that. And what I have set up
is that when it detects that my phone has left the invisible perimeter around my house, which is called geo-fencing, it is going to set my thermostat to 85, because I don't want my air to be running while I'm not home.

And it's also gonna turn
off every light in my house. Now, some additional things
that you can do with this I just don't have these
in my house right now, is you can also have
it lock any smart locks that you have around the house. So if you've got one on your front door, it can make sure that that
is automatically locked. You can also have it do something like turn on your robot vacuum and vacuum the house while you're gone. Or even close the garage door, if you have a smart garage door opener. So there are a lot of
things that you can program into a routine like this when you leave the
perimeter of your house. All right, now the last easy routine that I have for beginners is a good night routine. So with a good night routine, you could do things like make
sure the front door is locked, turn off all the lights in the house, maybe adjust the thermostats
to a different temperature. But what I have set up
for my good night routine is I actually use it for my kids.

So I'm gonna go ahead and
load up the phone right here we're back in the routine menu, and if we scroll all the
way down to the bottom, I've got one at the very
bottom that says good night. So when I say good night
in my daughter's room to the Echo device what it's going to do, is it's going to turn on her fan, 'cause she likes a little
bit of white noise. So we have a smart plug
that's gonna turn on that fan, and we also have it play lullabies from Pandora for one hour.

So what's nice about that is that I don't have music
playing all throughout the night, it's gonna on for just a one hour timer, usually by then she's
asleep on a good night and then that'll just turn itself off, and the fan will stay on
till the next morning, when we automatically turn it off. Well, those are some simple
routines that you can do with the Amazon Echo devices. This was just kind of
a getting started guide to automating your home. If this is something that you like, hit that thumbs up button and
let us know that you liked it, because if so, we will
do more videos like this. If you guys have other automation ideas that you like leave them
in the comments below. If you wanna know more
about these devices, take a look at the link below, it's reviews.org. If you
guys wanna see more from me, check out my YouTube channel, Steve Does, where I do a lot of cool tech reviews.

If this video is helpful, give it a thumbs up, let me know that you liked it. As always, I wanna thank you for
joining me here @reviews.org, and I will see you guys in the next video..