The Best Alexa Skill for Nest
The Problem:
The official Nest Alexa skill is rather limited. This is disappointing since the Nest smart thermostat mobile app is rather full featured.</p?
I recently purchased a Nest thermostat along with a wide variety of smart home automation devices which I reviewed in this earlier post. Alexa Turn On? – Amazon Alexa Smart Home Integration
I installed the Nest Alexa Skill provided by Nest , but was disappointed that it could only raise and lower the temperature of the thermostat. What I was looking for was a way to ask Alexa to tell me the current Nest settings.
The Solution:
The limited Alexa Nest functionally can be easily resolved using Alexa Skills from third party developers. The best Alexa Skill I have found is called, Thermostat Controller by Underscore Research LLC. This is really a full featured set of Nest commands.
For my problem of getting the current Nest settings:
“Alexa ask the thermostat about settings”
Returns this result:
“The temperature is 73 degrees in the Nest Thermostat, with the thermostat set to heat to 72.”
This works great, just what I wanted.
Here are a few examples of other commands the Alexa Thermostat Controller skill supports:
- “Alexa tell the thermostat to turn on the fan”
- “Alexa ask the thermostat the humidity”
- “Alexa tell the thermostat to change mode to cool”
- “Alexa tell the thermostat that we are leaving“
- “Alexa tell the thermostat its a bit cold“
- “Alexa ask the thermostat the temperature in Celsius”
and many more. Even though I only have one Nest thermostat and therefore was unable to verify the results, the developer has included multi-location Nest support. Here are a few examples:
- “Alexa tell the thermostat to turn on the bedroom fan”
- “Alexa tell the thermostat to turn up the second floor”
- “Alexa tell the thermostat to change attic to heat and cool”
This is much more functionality than offered by the minimalist Nest Alexa skill.
To use the Thermostat Controller skill you first enable it, then link your Nest account with your Amazon Echo account.
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