‘Alexa, I’m home’: how to use an Amazon Alexa Range Rover to control your smart home

Amazon’s Alexa assistant has finally arrived inside cars in Australia. This is how you can use it to control your smart home.

Amazon Echo Auto is an aftermarket device to let drivers talk to the company's voice assistant. Alexa has recently been added to Jaguar Range Rover vehicles.

Imagine you’re driving home after an exhausting day but you know it will be (a) stiflingly hot, (b) pitch black, and (c) eerily quiet when you arrive.

What if you could ask you car to crank up the air conditioner, turn on a fan, switch on the lights, warm up the Xbox or start your favourite playlist?

These are some of the things you can unlock by adding Amazon’s voice assistant to the car — something launched for the first time in Australia by Jaguar Land Rover.

After almost two years in development, engineers behind the luxury brand launched Alexa on to the dashboards of more than 7400 cars in Australia in February, as well as more than 200,000 cars around the world.

But how do you get your smart car to control your home, and how can you do it with an older vehicle?

Adding a smart voice assistant to a car might not be new, with Apple’s CarPlay and Google Android Auto launching on car dashboards since 2014.

But Amazon had yet to officially put its controls into cars in Australia; something Alexa Auto International director Christian Mentz said it had been working on with Jaguar Land Rover for about 18 months.

“It’s very exciting because we’d love to bring Alexa to as many cars as possible,” he said.

“Customers who use Alexa in their homes, they want to use the same experience in their cars.

“But we’d like to ensure that we can actually deliver a good customer experience and so we focus on having a localised experience; ensure we work with local content providers for music and service providers … for points of interest.”

Mr Mentz said it was also important for the Alexa assistant to fade into the background when not in use, and control parts of drivers’ smart homes when they needed it.

Those home additions could include connected lights, like those from Philips Hue, air conditioners controlled by a Tado or Sensibo gadget, fans connected to a smart plug, or even a garage door hooked up to the internet with a Connect SmartHome device.

In a test drive of the connected Range Rover Velar, for example, we turned on the porch lights for our arrival using Alexa, requested plenty of songs from Spotify, checked the weather at our destination, and enjoyed turn-by-turn navigation in a head-up display from the car’s own technology after asking Alexa for directions. Alexa could be triggered by saying her name or pressing a button on the steering wheel.

JLR electrical engineering head Alex Heslop said the team behind its rollout were determined to make sure the handover from Amazon’s assistant to the car’s own technology occurred without delay and, now Alexa was on board cars, they would add more voice controls in future.

“We will definitely build out the capabilities to control more and more things within the vehicle over time because cars are getting complicated and we want to deliver an (interface) that is very flat and intuitive,” he said.

“Some elements will become more and more voice-controlled and less switch-controlled. There is a natural capability within the vehicle that we have started to explore and will continue to explore.”

The new app was pushed out to a range of existing Jaguar, Land Rover and Range Rover cars using its Pivi Pro software on February 3.

Those who have a different brand or vintage of vehicle, however, can access some voice features with an Echo Auto accessory connected to their phone and plugged into their car’s AUX input.