How to turn on Alexa Hunches to automate tasks for yourself

for us, or see who’s at the door, or look up information, but are they truly “smart”? In a way not really because it pretty much only does what you tell it to do, meaning that if you don’t, it won’t do it.

For example, if you set up an automation task where every night, your house lights will turn on when the sun goes down, but what if you’re away on holiday and forget to disable that automation? Your smart speakers and digital assistant won’t be smart enough to figure that out, right?

That’s an area Amazon is trying to address with Alexa Hunches, where it tries to learn what you do and then from there, tries to automate certain tasks so that if you forget to do it, it will do it for you. According to Amazon:

“For example, if one of your smart lights is on when you say “Good night,” Alexa alerts you and offers to turn it off. Alexa can have hunches about a variety of supported smart home device, including lights, thermostats, doors, switches and more.”

So, if you happen to own an Amazon Alexa enabled speaker that you would like to enable Hunches on, here’s what you need to do.

Turn on Alexa Hunches

1. Launch the Alexa app on your smartphone
2. Tap the “More” button with the three lines as its icon
3. Select Settings
4. Scroll down and tap on Hunches
5. Next to Enabled, tap on it to toggle it on. If the toggle is blue it is means it has already been enabled, so tap on it to turn it off if you’re trying to disable it

Enable Alexa Hunches automatically

So now that you’ve enabled Hunches, Alexa will still ask if you want it to do something. Presumably this is to make users feel a bit more comfortable and give them more control over the digital assistant, but if you’d rather not go through that process of confirming everytime, then you can actually set it so that it does it automatically.

1. Launch the Alexa app
2. Tap on More and then tap on Settings
3. Tap on Hunches
4. Tap Set up automatic actions
5. Select the Hunches you want Alexa to automatically act on

If you don’t see any Hunches available, then it probably means that the device you’re using isn’t compatible with the feature.

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