Amazon’s Alexa has been able to directly control smart thermostats for over a year now, but one glaring omission has been its inability to tell you anything about the thermostats current state. While you could always ask Alexa to set a temperature, you couldn’t request what the thermostat was set to or request to hear the actual current indoor temperature, leaving many to resort to using third-party Alexa Skills for those tasks. Amazon has now finally updated their Alexa Smart Home Skill API to support thermostat requests.
This means Alexa will natively be able to read back a smart home thermostat’s current setting and temperature when you ask “Alexa, what’s my thermostat set to?” or “Alexa, what’s the thermostat temperature?” The units used, Celsius or Fahrenheit, for the temperature read back to you will be determined by a setting you configure in the Alexa app.
Smart thermostat manufacturers will need to implement the new ability to query temperatures themselves, so this isn’t something that will just start working immediately for everyone. I have a 3rd Generation Nest thermostat and when I ask for the temperature, Alexa tells me that command does not work on my device, so Nest has not yet updated their Alexa integration to support the new feature. Hopefully it doesn’t take long for thermostat manufacturers to support this very handy new capability.
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AFTVnews
awesome news… I go the ecobee 3 and it tells me the same .
hopefully the thermostat manufactures don’t take too long.
Doesn’t work on my Nest 2nd generation, I get the same results.
She tells me she doesn’t work on that device (Hive).
My Google home has been able to do it from day one, 2nd and 3rd generation Nests. It’s about time my dot can do this very basic task.
I don’t think enabling the Nest skill to have this available is really all that much of a hurdle to jump but maybe that’s just me. The skill is made by Nest and still seems to be required to discover the Nest thermostat anyway but I feel safe using it.