Just curious to see what people are using!
I have a google home unit. Like it so far, though I can see they have a long way to go to make it more useful.
That’s my fear. Although I would like on (UK) but will it improve my life in anyway or is it just another gadget?
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I got a UK Echo for the kitchen and a dot for the lounge, and my wife’s said she wants another one for the study. She made fun of it at first, but I found I’d walk into the room and it would be playing music or Radio 4 … thought it had developed a mind of it’s own but it turned out she’d started using it when I wasn’t around. 
We both use it for things like kitchen timers (hands-free), adding things to Any.do shopping lists on our phones, getting news updates, … For home automation I have it hooked up to a Vera Plus via ha-bridge on a Raspberry Pi, so I can turn appliances on/off by voice, and directly linked to Philips Hue hub to control lights … it’s great to just say “Alexa, turn off the downstairs lights” when we turn in for the night.
Note, however, that the current beta Vera Alexa skill / Vera firmware does not seem to be working for UK Echos, so ha-bridge is your best option at the moment. It is a beta test, so I’m sure that will be fixed soon though.
[quote=“alpha1, post:3, topic:194395”]That’s my fear. Although I would like on (UK) but will it improve my life in anyway or is it just another gadget?
Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk[/quote]
Well, I just got it running with the ha-bridge talking to vera tonight and this makes it much more useful now. My intent was always to get it working with vera so I could use it for home control. But we actually have been finding it useful for other things as well. It’s getting a good workout every day, but there are still a lot of answers of “I don’t know how to do that”, or “I don’t know how to help with that”, or “XXX is not supported yet, but we’re working on it”.
I have a couple Amazon Echo Dots working with my test VeraEdge. So far so good - mainly using it for lighting control.
Have an Echo in the living room. We use it mainly to control lights in that part of the house, living room, kitchen, dining room and entry way.
My family uses it more than I do. They seem to prefer to ask Alexa to turn on the lights even when they are in arms reach of the scene controller.
My daughter uses Alexa all the time to ask questions. For example when she’s doing her homework she may ask “Alexa, what is 12 percent of 42”.
We recently added a Harmony Elite and I’m finding that extremely useful since I prefer to use the native remotes for TiVo and Apple TV which are 90% of our TV viewing.
So I can use the original remote and just ask Alexa to do the input switching for me.
I just got my echo today and set it upright away but I was wondering if anyone that’s using the beta is able to access modes on your Vera?