FEBRUARY 2019 PCWorld 103single speaker.
Some of Alexa’s Routine shortcomings
do have workarounds, though. With lighting
control, Alexa Routines are incapable of
dimming multiple lights as part of a Group.
You can get around this by adding each light
to your Routine individually, and setting their
brightness levels one by one.
Another notable limitation: Music
playback can only be the final step of a
Routine, so you can’t create a morning alarm
that plays a few minutes of relaxing music
before switching gears. The only way around
this is to create separate Routines and
schedule one after the other.
And while Alexa’s new location-based
triggers can come in handy, they only work
with a single user. That means you can’t
ensure everyone’s out of the house before
triggering a Routine that turns off the lights
and lowers the thermostat. You’ll need to
look beyond Alexa Routines for this. Certain
smart home hubs, such as Samsung’s
SmartThings, support multi-user geofencing
(go.pcworld.com/geof), and you can also
use the location-sharing service Life360 with
IFTTT (go.pcworld.com/l360) to automate
smart home devices based on multiple
users’ whereabouts.
Despite these limitations, Alexa
Routines continue to get more useful,
with music timers, wait times, and
location-based Routines among the most
recently added features. Hopefully it
won’t be long before Amazon lets users
do even more.Alexa Routines can’t dim multiple lights as a group. Instead, add each light individually to the Routine.