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In both of my Amazon Echo and Logitech Harmony Home Control articles, I wrote about using Amazon Echo to control your television using Logitech Harmony. But unfortunately the IFTTT solution at that time was premature and didn’t really work.

Last month, IFTTT release a new update in partnership with Amazon Echo that allows you to trigger a receipe with a specific phrase on the Amazon Echo. You will have to start the trigger with “Alexa, trigger …”.

In this case, my specific phrase is “on tv” and hence the full phrase becomes, “Alexa, trigger on tv”. This will trigger a Watch TV Activity on Logitech Harmony’s end which basically switches on your television.

You can checkout the recipe: Switch on your TV using Alexa.

To switch off the television, I created another recipe with the phrase “off tv” and the full phrase becomes “Alexa, trigger off tv”. This will trigger an end to the Watch TV Activity.

You can checkout the recipe: Switch off your TV using Alexa.

Amazon Echo With Logitech Harmony works pretty much instantaneously.

Logitech Harmony is a pretty powerful device with the use of activities. You can create a new activity called “Watch Apple TV Activity” which basically switches on your television and switches the input to your Apple’s TV HDMI port and then create another recipe that triggers it, for example, “Alexa, trigger on apple tv”.

You can also create an activity called “Lower TV Volume Activity” and have IFTTT trigger it using “Alexa, trigger lower volume tv”.

Let your imagination run wild and feel free to suggest any good use cases in the comments!