Enable motion detection in your home with Alexa and take control!
Intelligent voice assistants are all the rage right now. In fact, more and more people are turning to things like Alexa or Siri to set up various home routines and manage other smart devices that make life easier and more comfortable for us—but if we take a closer look at Alexa, we’ll see that this assistant has improved a lot in recent years, adding new features like the one we’re going to show you now, which can help prevent break-ins or keep your house from being occupied while you’re away on vacation. Discover then this secret Alexa trick and keep your home safe.
Alexa’s secret trick to keep your home safe
You may not be familiar with this Alexa trick that will help you protect your home in summer while you’re away. And it’s all thanks to the ultrasonic motion sensor that the assistant now includes. Learn what it’s used for and how to use this feature in this article.
This sensor can be a big help when we want to give our assistant tasks or automations that depend on motion detection, and while it can, for example, turn off a light when it detects that nobody is in that room, it can also alert us if someone enters the house.
In this way, you can set up the device so that it runs the command from the Alexa mobile app every time it detects motion and lets us know. It’s Amazon Echo Dot and Echo devices from the 4th generation and above that support ultrasonic motion detection, so you should keep that in mind to find out whether the feature will work with your Alexa model.
How do you enable motion detection in Alexa?
If motion detection is enabled on your device, you need to open the Alexa app on your mobile and go to the «Devices» section. Once you’ve selected it, tap the settings icon in the top-right corner and scroll down until you see the «Ultrasonic motion detection» option.
Here, you need to make sure the switch is turned on. Additionally, you can choose the sensitivity and the detection interval, always according to your needs.
You can find a direct link to create routines for detecting people in the same section, which you can access by clicking the «Go to routines» link that appears on the last line.
Select «Digital Home» and «Presence» in the «When» section after choosing the device you want to configure if you want to use the presence detector in your routine. Remember that if you want Alexa to act when it detects motion nearby, you also need to enable «People have been detected».
Additionally, you can choose how long you want the routine to run. Tell Alexa what you want it to do after you’ve configured all the parameters—for example, whether you want it to alert you with a message. Finally, click «Save» and your presence-detection routine will be available.











































































































