How Amazon Alexa and Logitech Harmony Can Control Your Entire Family Room Entertainment System

Movie night just got a lot easier and enjoyable, thanks Logitech’s decision to incorporate Amazon Alexa technology with its Harmony home control hub. When the skill is enabled on Amazon Echo or Amazon Echo Dot, you can start and stop Harmony Activities, control your entertainment devices, or even turn directly to your favorite channels, hands free, using only your voice. Harmony users can simply say “Alexa, turn on the TV,” or “Alexa, turn on Netflix” to control the TV as well as other entertainment and smart home devices, and Harmony makes it happen.

“This new capability is both practical and fun for our users,” says Renee Niemi, general manager of the smart home business at Logitech. “We’ve been working closely with Amazon to deliver robust voice control of your smart home using a Harmony hub-based remote and an Alexa-enabled device — and if you don’t have Harmony yet, just say ‘Alexa, order a Harmony Hub’ and have one delivered.”

With Harmony Activities, different actions and more than 270,000 devices can be combined to bring an entire scene to life. For example, you can say, “Alexa, turn on my evening activity,” to your Amazon Echo or Echo Dot and Alexa will use Logitech Harmony to start a series of actions that you’ve previously defined, such as turning the TV to HBO, bringing down the blinds and dimming the smart lights — all at once.

“The Alexa experience just got smarter, thanks to our friends at Logitech,” says Rob Pulciani director of Alexa at Amazon.  “Logitech Harmony is an innovator in entertainment and smart home control, and together through this new Alexa skill and the Harmony hub-based remote, we’re bringing voice control of the living room entertainment experience to Alexa and Harmony customers.”

To take advantage of this new capability, launch the Alexa app on your smartphone and select Smart Home from the left-hand navigation menu, Get More Smart Home Skills, and search for ‘Harmony.’ A Logitech hub-based remote such as the Logitech Harmony Elite or Logitech Harmony Companion is required.

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