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The Alexa Home Map is a visual way to see and control your smart home

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The Alexa Home Map is a visual way to see and control your smart home

In case you're sick of remembering what you named your thirteenth lamp.

Alongside a slew of Echo devices, Amazon also introduced a new smart home interface today. It's called the Alexa Home Map, and the company describes it as "an interactive 3D map that lets you see and control your home."

Most modern control panels from the likes of Google and Apple display your collection of connected home devices as tiles on a page. You open an app, whether it's Google Home or Apple Home, and you're presented with rows and columns of these cards. Depending on the type of device represented, you can either tap on a card to turn a light on, or drag a slider on it to adjust things like volume or brightness. But this setup requires you to either scroll through a list of rooms in your home or sort by type of device or pin your most commonly used items to the dashboard.

It's something we've gotten used to, but is not necessarily the most intuitive. With the Alexa Home Map, you can get a digital blueprint of your home, and it will feature animated icons for things you can control. Light bulbs and speakers appear on the map where they're located, which is handy if you've forgotten what you've named a specific fixture and only remember where they're placed.

The Alexa Home Map also works with outdoor security cameras to show you what's around your house, including passing vehicles and pedestrians. But rather than present photorealistic representations of individuals, the map uses a visualization that to me was initially reminiscent of scenes from The Sims .


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