LIVING SMARTER
Track your precious stuff and locate it in an instant
Never lose anything again by harnessing the power of your voice
Alexa and the Google Assistant know an awful lot about you. And if you choose, they can know an awful lot about your stuff, too – including, crucially, where you’ve left it. Let’s start basic: if you use Alexa’s Storage Box skill, you can effectively catalogue all the items in your house based on where you’ve left them. Tell your Echo that you’ve left your keys in the bathroom, and you can ask later on – or check via its companion app – when you’ve forgotten where they are.
Storage Box does require a lot of manual intervention, and it relies on your remembering to actually use it – it’s more useful if you’re putting items into storage than day-to- day. Keeping track of your phone is easy enough. Check the ‘Locate your phone’ box to do it with Alexa; the functionality is built into Google Assistant and Google’s integrated Find my Phone feature. On Android, you can even make your phone ring if it’s set to silent.
Keeping other items requires a little more ingenuity and investment. There are a number of tracking devices out there that attach to the things you care about – Tile’s range of square trackers (from £17) play nice with both Google Assistant and Alexa, as do TrackR’s dinky £ 25 keychains. Both will sound an alert when triggered by a voice assistant so
With Alexa’s Storage Box skill, you can catalogue the items in your house
you can hunt them, or let you know when and where you last had them.
Attach a tracking device to your keys, slide one in your wallet, or even tag your pets, and everything becomes findable with just a shout. TrackR’s tech is even going further: pick up a Cross Peerless TrackR Pen (£ 209) and you can keep your favourite writing instrument safe, too.