iRobot has announced that IFTTT support has arrived for Roomba vacuums, making it much easier to control the little robots that are going around cleaning your home. The point of IFTTT is to automate different things, from actions on your smartphone to smart, connected devices you have hooked up in the house, and now that IFTTT support is here for Roomba devices users will be able to interact with the applets for any number of different tasks, all without having to initiate a thing by using the app to get things done.
So far there are 11 different applets on the iRobot IFTTT page, from posting to Facebook whenever your vacuum finishes cleaning your home, to sending out a tweet so that you can activate the vacuum to start a cleaning job. While it might simply be easier to just set up a cleaning schedule within the app or hit the start button instead of sending out a tweet, that particular applet could be useful of you’re already using Twitter when you want the cleaning to begin. There’s also an applet for stopping the vacuum’s cleaning process once you arrive home so if you’re worried about it being in the way when you walk in the door, this applet would be one that you would want to set up so that doesn’t become an issue.
Users could also have their Roomba clean using IFTTT’s weather service triggers if they’re alerted to a high pollen count in the surrounding area, or even pause the Roomba’s cleaning process if a phone call comes through so that it’s more quiet, allowing the user to talk on the phone without any noisy interruptions. There are likely more applets to come for the Roomba integration, and in fact that ties into a couple of the available applets as there is one for sending out email alerts when new applets from iRobot have been published and another for sending out an email alert when new triggers or actions from iRobot have been published. This way users will always know about new automation techniques using their Roomba vacuum without having to go searching for any new things that are possible. Another good thing is that IFTTT has integration with Google Home, so those with a smart speaker powered by Google Assistant will be able to do even more. If you have an iRobot Roomba vacuum and you’re not using IFTTT yet, now might be a good time to check it out.