TURN YOUR SMART HOME INTO A MENSA MANSION WITH THESE AI ASSISTANT TIPS FOR SMARTY PANTS.

[ JOEL BURGESS ]

WHILE SMART SPEAKERS generally earn their stripes as wireless audio devices, they’re arguably even more useful as the gatekeepers to all your smart home devices. While the Google Home — the first to officially make its way to Australia — approaches its first anniversary Down Under, there’s already a lot these speakers can do to make your home smarter. A smart speakers’ usefulness as a smart home hub rises and falls on its interconnectivity, and although Alexa controls the lion’s share of the market in the US, the Echo speakers launched here with a much smaller list of connected devices than their Google counterpart. The same could be said about the HomeKit ecosystem that can be controlled by Apple’s new HomePod speaker, although it is privy to a number of excellent smart home brands that aren’t made available to anything outside the iOS walled garden.

The landscape of smart speakers is a particularly dynamic one and we only expect this to be compounded as Amazon and Apple begin pushing competitive local features. But despite this growth, Australia was a little late to the smart speaker party and not all the compatibilities of foreign markets are offered here. This creates a fertile arena for third-party automation apps and script integration apps to manually get local devices doing everything that’s possible overseas, and in some cases far more.

This how-to feature will look at some of the more advanced things smart speaker power users can do, shy of developer level modifications, in order to get absolutely everything out of a smart home network.