Tech: Say ‘open sesame’ and close the blinds

First, appliances such as blinds and fans were hooked up to remote controls. Now they are voice activated.

With Luxaflex’s Interior Solutions, you can program how blinds behave or operate them from the net.

When author Antoine Galland invoked the phrase “Open sesame” in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, he stumbled on what 300 years later we call voice control.

We’re used to voice commands triggered with “Hey Siri”, “Hey Cortana” and “OK Google” on phones and tablets, or “Alexa” in the case of Amazon Echo. It therefore isn’t surprising that you can emulate Ali Baba and utter “Open sesame” to trigger a home automation feature. Instead of unlocking a den of 40 thieves, “Open sesame” may cause your new-age smart venetian blinds to spring open suddenly.

That’s because items such as blinds and ceiling fans can be operated from your home network and the internet, as well as from a smartphone or tablet app. They are among a long list of internet-connected devices that includes lights, power switches, thermostats, sprinkler systems, garage doors, home cookers, fridges, washing machines, door locks, pet feeders, security cameras and vacuum cleaners.

Luxaflex internet connected blinds

This means your typical motor-controlled hotel room blind that opens at the press of a button has been superseded by systems such as Luxaflex’s Interior Solutions where you can pre-program how blinds behave or operate them from across the net.

Using the PowerView app by Luxaflex for iOS and Android, you can program blinds to open at a particular time or close when the temperature is, say, above 30C, or open at sunrise and close one hour after sunset on weeknights.

You can group blinds together into rooms or scenes where they behave in unison. The system works with Google’s Nest thermostat, so you can program groups of blinds to open and shut when Nest registers particular temperatures. Again this is done with the app. One of the spin-offs of connected thermostats is their potential to save power and money, with light being left through to warm the house and blinds shut when it is hot.

But would you like to talk to your venetians the way Dr Dolittle talked to the animals? You can issue voice commands to the Luxaflex system using a combination of the blinds, an Amazon Echo (which you buy online from Amazon), and the extremely useful website IFTTT.com, aka “If this then that”.

Controlling a Luxaflex internet connected smart blind using Amazon Echo through the "If this then that" (IFTTT) website.

Amazon Echo is an intelligent hands-free speaker that responds to voice. You set it up in a room, connect it to the net and ask it for the weather, to play music, create a shopping list and read the news. Amazon Echo can turn on lights, connected appliances, even your television, in response to your voice.

What’s important here is that Amazon Echo and Luxaflex PowerView have channels in IFTTT.com. You can connect Amazon Echo to your blinds and issue voice commands through it to open and close your blinds.

* It’s common for airconditioners to connect to the internet but less known that some ceiling fans do too. For some time US manufacturer Big Ass Fans has been active in Australia selling its Haiku Wi-Fi-connected ceiling fan.

Functions include operating the fan and controlling its speed from the Haiku app, programming automatic speed adjustments, creating schedules for speed and light settings, and enabling sleep mode, which monitors bedroom temperature and adjusts the fan’s speed as you sleep.

The Big Ass Haiku smart ceiling fan.

If you wore a Jawbone Up activity tracker, the fan would adjust its speed and the room temperature during the night when the Up detected restlessness. It would increase its speed and switch on the light as you woke up gradually.

And it would use motion sensing to detect when you entered or left a room to switch the fan and light on or off.

A recent update means Haiku also works with Amazon Echo. So you can tell Amazon assistant Alexa to “turn on my living room fan” or “set my bedroom fan to 80 per cent”.

Further, you can control a light fitted to the fan in the same way. So Amazon Echo will switch on or off the light or turn it to 80 per cent brightness if that is what you want.

In the end, you can link this functionality so that when you enter a room, the lights, blinds and ceiling fan all adjust in unison.