Alexa can now proactively act on her own hunches



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Illustration from article titled Alexa Can Now Proactively Act On Her Own Hunches

Photo: Catie Keck / Gizmodo

Amazon’s assistant can now turn on your robot vacuum or turn off your smart lights on its own. Yes, you heard right.

Amazon ad last September, it would soon roll out an update that would allow Alexa to act on its hunches on the behavior of your connected devices in your home: turning off a smart bulb in a room long after you have fallen asleep, for example. Normally, Hunches works by allowing Alexa to simply suggest solutions to these detected issues. But now Alexa users can choose to allow the smart assistant to do the thing itself.

Hunches are on by default, though Alexa explains how to turn off the feature after explaining your first hunch. To access your Hunches preferences, open the Alexa app and select the “more” option in the menu at the bottom of the screen. To select settings, scroll down and click Intuitions.

It was particularly interesting for me, the owner of a connected coffee machine. Surely, I thought, it has the potential to go terribly wrong if Alexa becomes a thug and starts brewing my next morning coffee in the middle of the night – just slowly depleting my supply of coffee grounds.

But as of today, functionality is limited to smart locks, lights, outlets and thermostats. If you have another device connected, however, the spokesperson said users “may start receiving Hunches from Alexa depending on how you typically use your connected devices.”

For now, it looks like my coffee is safe. So help me if this robot slowly starts to reduce what’s left of my sanity.

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