If using a remote to turn on your TV is too old school for you, here’s how to use the Amazon Echo to turn on your television using your voice with a little help from Logitech’s Harmony Hub.
Once upon a time, you had to use the mildly-clunky IFTTT to link these two together. But the Amazon Echo just recently added native support for the Logitech Harmony Hub, making it easier than before to hook up the two devices, and control your home theater with custom voice commands.
The Echo’s Harmony integration isn’t all-powerful, though. It can only control “activities” you have set upon your Harmony Hub, so if you haven’t set up activities to turn the TV on, turn the stereo on, or do whatever else you want to do, you’ll want to do that now. If you’re already using a Harmony Hub, you likely already have it all set up, but if not, we have a thorough guide that takes you through the process.
Once that’s done, you’ll need to install the Harmony Alexa skill, which you can do within the Alexa app. We have a guide that shows you how to install Alexa skills (as well as some useful ones you should try out), but the gist of it is this: open the Alexa app, tap on the sidebar menu button in the top-left corner of the screen, select “Skills”, search for a skill, and then tap on “Enable Skill” to install it.
When you go to enable the Harmony skill, you’ll need to log into your Logitech account, and after you do so, you may need to update your Harmony Hub before you can use it with Alexa. If that’s the case, open up the Harmony app on your phone and tap on the menu button in the top-left corner.
From there, select “Harmony Setup”.
Tap on “Sync”.
Tap on “Sync Now”.
Hit “Yes” when the pop-up appears.
Once your Harmony Hub has updated, you’ll need to go back into the Alexa app and install the Harmony skill again, as well as log into your Logitech account (it’s likely a weird bug that causes this).
After you log in, you’ll choose which activities you want Alexa to recognize. You can also tap on “Add Friendly Name” to provide Alexa with a better phrase to use. So instead of saying “Alexa, turn on Watch TV”, you can use “TV” as a friendly name for that activity. This allows you to say “Alexa, turn on TV” to invoke that activity. As you can see in the screenshot, “TV” and “Television” are friendly names that were set automatically, but you can add more.
If you have activities you don’t want to control with Alexa (say, smarthome devices that Alexa already controls separately), you can uncheck them from this list completely.
Tap on the arrow when you’re done with this step.
On the next screen, tap on “Link Account” at the bottom.
You’ll then get a confirmation that Alexa was successfully linked with Harmony. From here, you can close out of the app and begin using your Echo or other Alexa-supported device to control your home entertainment system.
Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of capability that comes with Alexa integration. In fact, all you can do is turn on and off your entertainment center using Alexa. That’s really nice, but it’d be really great to have further control. Hopefully that’s something we’ll see in the future.