Amazon Adds Smart Home Camera Control to Echo Show [Video]

Amazon has announced that developers can now enable customers to view live video feeds from home security cameras on Echo Show with the Smart Home Skill API.

Customers can say, “Alexa, show the front door” and have the feed from an Internet connected camera like Arlo or Ring display on Echo Show.

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Enable Customers to View Live Feeds of Their Smart Home Cameras
You can now use the Smart Home Skill API to show live streams from smart home cameras. Because the Smart Home Skill API taps into Amazon’s standardized Alexa language model, you won’t need to build the voice interaction model for your camera skill. Alexa will understand the customer’s speech, convert it to a directive, and send that directive to your skill adapter. Your skill adapter will return the video feed URI from the requested camera. The URI is then passed to the Echo Show device so it can directly display the video.
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Companies like Ring, Arlo, Nest, August, EZViz, Vivint, Amcrest, and IC Realtime and have already created Alexa skills leveraging the new cameras capability. For example, if you have a Ring smart video doorbell or security camera, you can easily see and answer the door or pull up video from your security camera hands-free.

“With our skill for Alexa, customers don’t have to take out their phones and open the Ring app to see their camera feed. With Echo Show, customers can instantly connect to their Ring video doorbell using voice,” says Darrell Sommerlatt, Software Engineer at Ring.




NETGEAR has also built an Alexa skill to enable customers to simply ask for a live view of any of their Arlo cameras.

“Our Alexa skill makes it fast and easy for our customers to access their Arlo cameras and see what’s happening. It could be the baby’s room or the front door or the backyard camera; you can see live video right away. It is an amazing end-user experience,” says Naveen Chhangani, Senior Director of Product Management at Arlo by NETGEAR.

More details at the link below. You can pre-order an Echo Show from Amazon for $229.99.

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