During its fall hardware event on Wednesday, Amazon showed off a new way for folks to control all of their compatible smart home devices. It’s called Map View and it will first be available on select phones in the US later this year.
You’ll be able to create a digital floor plan of your home using your phone and Map View will display all the devices you add to it. Rather than using Alexa or another app to manage a device, you can see its location in your home and tap on it to (for instance) switch on a light, bump up the volume of an Echo speaker or change the temperature. It looks like a fairly straightforward and intuitive user interface.
Amazon says it’s an opt-in experience — you can decide which rooms to add to the floor plan and which devices to include. You can delete your floor plan at any time as well.
On a related note, Amazon is attempting to buy iRobot. Several Roomba devices are capable of mapping out your home to help with cleaning them. It’s not difficult to imagine how that might integrate into Map View.
Follow all of the news live from Amazon’s 2023 Devices event right here.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazons-map-view-puts-your-smart-home-devices-on-a-digital-floor-plan-163058372.html?src=rss