One of the big Alexa features Amazon announced at their conference this year is the ability to create a map of your house and add all of your devices to said map. This feature is slowly rolling out to users who were on the waitlist (like me) and ultimately will be a standard feature for all users. My assumption is that this will be fully released alongside the upcoming Echo Hub home controller.
The start of my Map View experience was a little clunky, but thankfully it wont be this way when it is rolled out as a standard feature. I was alerted that my access was enabled via email. At the very bottom of the email was a yellow button to “Learn More.” I certainly wouldn’t have expected that to be the way I had to access the feature, but once I tapped it, it opened my Alexa app and started the Map View setup wizard.
Setup is an augmented reality experience that I enjoyed once I got past some difficulties. The app asks you to scan each room, one at a time, slowly moving your camera around the room while it discovers walls, doors, windows, even furniture. This works very well in rooms with standard doorways, such as bedrooms, and extremely poorly in rooms that may have non-standard doorways, like entryways or open concept homes.
On my second floor, where we keep the bedrooms, this was quick and easy and each room scanned in seconds. The app even knows when you’ve pretty much completed a room and asks you if you’re finished. You’re also given an opportunity to move walls or entire rooms around (but not to add doors or windows that weren’t scanned properly).
My first floor is very open. Even the two rooms with close to four walls have floor to ceiling openings for doorways. The app couldn’t identify these as “doors” and wouldn’t let me complete scanning the room, or on the odd occasion it did, the room would be a weird L shape that didn’t make any sense. I also have a large great room on this floor that flows into the mud room, and the app couldn’t discover the transition between these rooms. Ultimately, after many failures to scan I decided to scan the entire floor as one room, adding room divisions after the floor was scanned. This worked well, and I was able to tack on the bathroom on this floor after all the other rooms were complete.
My basement is wide open, but is logically divided into a playroom, theater, laundry room and office. Using the same concept as my first floor I scanned the whole floor at once, then split it up and added the bathroom.
Finally, you are asked to add your devices to the map by dragging them to their specific places in the house. One caution here, put your devices in the room that they control, not where they may be located in your house. For instance I have a bank of switches in my basement located in the playroom that control the playroom, laundry room and theater lights. Although the switches are physically together in the playroom, I had to move them to the proper rooms on the map.
Now you may be asking yourself if splitting the rooms up in an open floor plan makes any sense, and I suppose that’s up to personal preference, but this is an activity you’re going to want to do. See, part of the functionality of Map View is the logical groups it creates based on the rooms you create. Continuing the example above, after setting up my map we started having issues with the lights in the basement. We completely lost the ability to control the theater lights by voice or by routine, but could still control them with both the Kasa and Alexa apps. It took me a very long time to realize it was because the theater light switch was located in the playroom on the map, and therefore Alexa now considered them to be playroom lights. In another example, once I created a room called “Living Room” on my map Alexa now considers all bulbs, plugs and switches in my living room to be “living room lights” despite my having a longstanding group with that name for just the lamps.
I still have weird things happening throughout my house after setting up Map View. In my office, I occasionally find the TV powered on, which to my knowledge can only happen if something sends a command to my Broadlink Red Bean, and I honestly thought the functionality with Alexa stopped working months ago. The map also doesn’t leave room for anything you may have outside, so my security cameras and a whole host of things I have installed out in the pool cabana are just placed in whitespace off the map. I haven’t noticed anything strange happening with them yet, but I wont be surprised if I find music blasting outside one day this winter.
As someone with over 130 smart devices throughout my house it’s gotten cumbersome to manage everything through the Alexa app. Amazon has added a lot of sorting and filtering features to make this easier in their latest releases, but the logical Map View layout makes it so much quicker to locate devices. I can see how this will bring some Home Assistant like layout functionality to the Alexa ecosystem once the Echo Hub is released.
Overall I think the Map View functionality is going to be a huge positive for power users. People with less motivation to get deep into the Alexa/smart home ecosystem will probably resist putting in the necessary setup work. And people with a security obsession will probably balk at the idea of scanning literally everything in their house for Amazon to catalog and use to target you with ads (one of my coffee tables is looking pretty shabby after three toddlers had at it so we’ll see). Amazon has a pretty solid track record of updating new features over time, so I’m sure there will be additions or fixes by the time this is fully released. Even now, though, Map View is a killer new feature I highly recommend.
