If you currently have Amazon Echo
What Is It?
Alexa Guard is one of the most useful features to be added to the Echo/Alexa platform recently. With it enabled, it adds the ability for your Alexa Echo devices to listen for smoke/Co2 alarms and glass breaks, as well as enable automated smart lighting controls to simulate your lighting patters to make it appear as though you’re home, when away. While these features were attainable before Alexa Guard, they generally required some sort of add-on device like a smart smoke or Co2 alarm. If you’ve ever looked into the cost of these devices, you know just how expensive it could get to outfit your entire house with them…Now all you really need is two or three Amazon Echos depending on the size of your home, and if you’re like many, you already have that.
How to Enable it
- Open your Amazon Alexa app from your mobile device, and navigate to settings.
- From there scroll down and select “Guard” in the settings list.
- Touch the gear icon to edit the Guard settings
- Toggle the Smoke & CO Alarm Sounds, and Glass Break Sounds on (you can only choose to have one of those on if you like)
- Further down in the settings screen you can add any smart lights to the “Away Lighting” section and activate that feature if desired.
- With those settings applied, go back to the original Guard screen, and you’ll notice a status button that says “HOME”. There are only two status options here, HOME and AWAY. To arm the guard service, simply say “Alexa I’m leaving”, and to disarm say “Alexa I’m home”. If you’re like me, and you forget to do this before leaving the house, just tap the “HOME” status button and it will toggle the status to “AWAY”.
Alarm Behavior
My original concern with the smoke/co2 alarm alerting was that the Echos would have a hard time distinguishing between a true smoke alarm, and a non-emergency alarm, like a stove timer. Fortunately after testing both stove timers, as well as the open door alarm on my refrigerator (echo in the same room) I was pleasantly surprised to find that neither triggered a false Alexa Guard alarm.
Next up, I set off a smoke alarm to make sure this feature really was all it claimed to be. For my testing, I triggered a smoke alarm on the second floor just outside of my bedroom where one echo was located, with a second on the opposite end of the second floor and a third echo on the first floor. Believe it or not, after about 30-45 seconds of the smoke alarm being triggered, all three echos alerted me of the detected smoke alarm! While you do get flooded with duplicate alerts (one from each echo) this means you can get away with fewer Echos throughout your home. In my case for smoke alarms, it seems as though a single Echo would be fine.
I haven’t thoroughly tested the glass break alarm yet. Fortunately, we haven’t dropped any dishes and I’ve managed not to anger my wife to the point of hurling plates at my face. I have however, received false positive alerts for glass breaking on a few occasions. Our dogs seem to patter their feet at the perfect resonance to fool the Echos into thinking glass is breaking. As I mentioned, this has only happened a few times, so I’m not too worried about it. In fact, one of the smartest about the Guard alerts is that a short audio clip of the sound that triggered the alert can be listened to from the Guard alert window. So any false positives that may happen, can easily be distinguished as such.
One Thing Missing..
I have very little to complain about here, but there is a single feature that would make Alexa Guard significantly better and more useful..Automated “Away” conditions. The fact that you have to remember to either say “Alexa I’m leaving”, or manually toggle Guard to “Away” really should be addressed. I’d like to see Amazon incorporate a geolocation feature in which you can have Guard automatically set the status based on the presence of people in the home. This is something I do with Samsung Smarthings to automatically arm the Samsung Smart Home Monitor. This is a no-brainer feature that I really hope Amazon sees the need for soon. It would add the cherry on top of a truly useful and important value add to their Echo line.
