Amazon's Echo Is Now Compatible With The Ecobeee Smart Thermostat

Amazon’s gotten a few things right when it comes to hardware. Their lineup of tablets and e-readers are likely to be forever popular due to their affordable nature, and the Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV stick have risen to become formidable rivals to Google’s wildly popular Chromecast HDMI streaming dongle. Another piece of hardware that Amazon continues to surprise with is the Echo, a smart speaker that while limited when it initially launched, has steadily been gaining support for more and more things, adding new features, and ultimately extending its functionality. Just last week Echo owners gained the ability to order an Uber ride just by voice commands. The Echo’s latest trick sees it gain support for yet another piece of smart home equipment, the ecobee3 smart thermostat.

As of today, ecobee has announced that their ecobee3 smart thermostat now works with the Amazon Echo to make your life just a little bit easier, allowing you to control your temperature around the home with just your voice. Aside from feeling futuristic as you’re basically telling your thermostat to raise or lower the temperature, it’s also extremely convenient if you’re doing something where you don’t want to get up but you know you either want or need it to be warmer or cooler.

Using this new function is rather simple and can be done in one of two ways, either with precise temperature, for example, you can ask Alexa to raise the temperature to 71 degrees, or with a more broad request and you can ask Alexa to cool things down. For now, it looks like the ecobee3 is the only smart thermostat that works with the Amazon Echo. Amazon does state that they will be adding support for more thermostats in the future though, so anyone with either the Nest thermostats or another brand will likely be able to look forward to using the Echo to adjust their in-home temperature before too long. Other past features Amazon has baked into the Echo include support for Spotify Connect to manage music, and the speaker is even capable of order pizza for you from Dominos. These are all things consumers can now easily accomplish via smartphones, but sometimes doing things without having to physically do them is a little more fun.