Five ways Alexa’s Map View will help you manage your smart home devices more efficiently

Five ways Alexa’s Map View will help you manage your smart home devices more efficiently

Amazon is rolling out Alexa’s Map View to a select number of users today (November 14), which means its launch to the general public won’t be far behind – so now is a good time to get to know this new and game-changing feature on the Alexa app, and learn how it will improve the way we manage the best smart home devices.

If you’re not caught up with the latest Alexa updates, Map View is one of the biggest upgrades Amazon is adding to the Alexa app. It’s a visual representation of your home’s (or office’s) floor plan and the devices that live in it, in interactive map form. And while the initial setup takes time – you’ll need to use your phone’s LiDAR camera, and walk around your entire home to create the map and detect all your smart home devices – it’ll make your life much easier, especially if you have more than five devices in your space.

Map View LiDAR scanning

(Image credit: Future / Michelle Rae Uy)

Its earliest iteration will have some limitations. It’ll only be available on iPhones that use LiDAR technology, for example, so those with Android phones or iPhones older than the iPhone 12 will be excluded. At the moment, it won’t be available on Echo Show displays, even those with hub functionality – at least to start with, it’ll only be available to the Echo Hub, as far as Amazon devices are concerned. Also, Amazon currently has no plans to roll out live reporting of moving smart home devices like a smart robot vacuum during a cleaning session. And sharable maps are not currently available, and it’s only accessible to those users who are logged in to the account holder’s credentials.

Still, Map View already comes with plenty of great features that further simplify your smart home life – whether you’ve only just invested in the best smart lights or one of the best smart speakers, or you’re already knee-deep in smart home devices. I recently had a chat with Charlie French, Director of Smart Home at Amazon, about this brand-new feature, and he shared with me some of the promising ways it will help you manage your devices better and more efficiently. 

Map View device setup

(Image credit: Future / Michelle Rae Uy)

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