![]() So I can’t turn on the lights in my living room, nor can I control most of my smart outlets with Cortana. Then I realized my smart outlets are either iClever or GE devices, and while the GE devices have Wink integration, the iClever devices do not. The lights in my living room are Magic Home devices, and Cortana has no integration for those. The problems started with my living room. I found it easier to control the music from the Spotify app than through voice interactions. Despite the wrong name, saying “play the blind forest on Spotify” correctly pulled up my Ori and the Blind Forest playlist, but saying “play Ori and the Blind Forest” confused Cortana every time. Calling up playlists was equally problematic. If I tried a few more times, it would eventually work. Cortana would tell me she couldn’t do that right now. About half the time, saying “Stop” or “stop the music” didn’t work. At least it did until I wanted to stop the music. The experience with most of my smart home devices was on par with Alexa or Google Assistant.Ĭortana continued well with easy to set timers and alarms, and adding Spotify was a simple process that seemed to work well. I’m currently using a Wink hub for many of my smart home devices and Philips light bulbs, and controlling those devices worked without issue. Cortana has Wink, Smartthings, and Philips Hue integration. When it came to Smart Home integration, I thought I was doing well at first. My primary use for my Google and Alexa devices are smart home controls, music, timers, and routines that automate things. If you keep an eye out, it’s not uncommon to see them for as little as $30. The price of the Invoke has dropped to $50, which is very low for a such a great sounding speaker, but you can get Echo Dots and Google Minis for less. So cheaply placing Cortana speakers around the house is out of the question. Unfortunately, there is no Google Home Mini or Echo dot equivalent, just the Invoke. It’s not a perfect one-to-one scenario, but good enough. So I acquired a Harmon Kardon Invoke for my office (where I spend a lot of my time) and used my phone in other locations in the house. But my PC doesn’t have a microphone, my Surface spends much of its time turned off these days, and my phone doesn’t have a decent enough microphone for quick voice commands. I own a Surface Pro 3, a Windows 10 PC, and I put Cortana on my phone. But I don’t have Cortana devices so conveniently placed. I have Alexa devices and Google devices scattered through my home. When I started with this experiment, I immediately ran into an issue.
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