Everything the Amazon Echo Hub Can Do

the next new smart home product is finally available this is the Amazon Echo Hub it is an 8in display that you can mount on your wall or place on your counter toop to have instant access to all of your different Amazon smart home devices you can quickly View Camera feeds turn on and off lights or you can even use it to secure your ring security system now there's a lot of things that this can do but let's go ahead get this unboxed and show you all about it let's get started so here on the side of the box you can see it's an 8in wall mounted touchcreen it has a smart home hub built in so that means it's going to be able to work with many different types of Smart Home Products it has Amazon sidewalk built in you can also use zigg products so if you have like a zigg light bulb like this you can pair it directly to this device to control it and then it will also work with matter devices as well as it has a built on thread border router which is great it has a customizable dashboard it has handsfree with a Alexa Voice Assistant built in you have microphones with an on and off button to mute it as well here on the back it talks about how easy we'll be able to control your smart home and then it works with many different Smart Home Products that you may have heard of ring Philips U TP link and much more so let's get this unboxed so in here you can see it looks very familiar like other Echo Show devices that we've seen but it is different where it doesn't have a big speaker on the back so it does have speakers built in but you can pair it with other local speakers so that it would play out of a better speaker there and there is no camera built into to here so here on the bottom you have some far- filled microphones so that it can listen to you you have a few speakers up here on the top on the left side there is nothing over here on the right side you have the mute so you can mute Alexa and then you have the volume up and down and then on the bottom there's nothing there and on the back here you have the option to hide your cord which is really cool and then you have USBC there in the top now let's go ahead and check out what's inside the Box we'll talk more about powering it in a minute so here we do have a quick start guide we can use and then here it does come with a pretty long USBC cable that we can power it with here we have some anchors and mounting screws here we have the power brick I like that nice small size 12.6 watts and then here we have the mount that we would use to mount it on the wall so there you can see the front mount now it comes with the wall mount if you want to have the counter Mount that is a separate accessory that you can get as well so we're going to mount this on and then this will just slide right on there and that is everything in the box now let's talk about powering this real quick so here we can easily plug in the cable and have it mounted down here and it's going to go down into a plug below which would work great but sometimes you may not want to have a cable you might just want to have a nice display now with option two you can get an in-all pass through cable this allows you to put the cord right from the outlet through the wall up to the echo Hub and then you don't have any cord scene so another option is to use power over Ethernet or Poe you would need to have a network switch that supports Poe so it's going to use ethernet to provide Power right to your device and the good thing about this is it can be placed through a wall so you could have an Ethernet run to the back of where you want this display mounted and then you can get a USBC to gigabit power over the ethernet dongle now this is pretty big but is what this is able to do is you're able to plug in the ethernet cable here put the other side in your Poe switch and then plug this in the back and then it would be powered so you could have it so no cables would be seen so let's go ahead get it set up right now using this Poe so you can see how that works so here I just happen to have a cable right here that I'm going to use plug that in and now I'm just going to plug this in the back you wouldn't need to Route this through the bottom there because you're just going to have a hole in the back of the wall wall right through here where you have this hidden in the wall now let's go ahead and see it is powering on now the papers in the Box are also a mounting template as well as a quick start guide to help get this set up just like other Echo Show devices we have the option to set this up right on the screen so here I'm just going to choose English hello ready for setup here I'm going to sign into my Amazon account and there will be a full keyboard on screen that is me we're going to agree and continue next we're going to agree to privacy settings now we're going to give it a name Brett's Echo Hub sounds great and we're going to select some personal information here it's going to give us a better use of the product knowing our weather and other things if it knows where we live here we're going to choose we're in North America and our time zone next we're going to choose where this is going to be in our home so we have all the different rooms that I have in my home I could choose the entry way you know if you have it by a door I could choose the the mudroom but we're going to go ahead and choose the kitchen cuz that's going of be the main place that we're going to use this and here it's asking if we're going to have it on a wall or on a stand and we're going to choose on the wall and then we have the option to choose our preferred speaker so if you don't want all the sounds to come out of here I could have it choose the Echo Show 10 if we have that in the same room as well to have uh the speaker for music and here I could even choose a group so all the music that's upstairs but where just going to have it be the speaker right here next we're going to choose our clock and photo display so here we could choose Amazon photos where it's automatically going to show our photos we've uploaded or you have a few other options here I'm going to go ahead and choose wild Earth for now next it's talking about Amazon sidewalk how it can better other Amazon sidewalk products and make its own network so you can choose to turn this on or off that's up to you this device is ready now you can hear the speakers from the top sounds pretty great and now it's going through the process to load everything that I have in my home on The Hub display now that we have it up and running I'm going to go ahead and get it installed so that I can then start testing it all out see how it all works and show you more about what this can do now the next step we need to figure out where it's going to go in the home now here I'm by the front door you know I could put it right here but this is also at the very end of a hallway so it's not going to be very useful there now another idea I think would be really cool is if there was a mount that you could put it underneath your cabinet so it kind of folds out and you could fold it away if you didn't want to see it then you could plug it in and easily hide the cable so um case manufacturers there's an idea for you another idea is right here so I'm kind of looking for a place where we're constantly walking by and we can see it in an open room so here is another idea putting it on the wall right here we can see the time the kitchen is right behind us here so now I'm in the kitchen we're going to be in here a lot so we'd be able to see it right there we'd be able to see who's at the door when somebody rings the doorbell um and so on but there's no other like wall that's kind of open in the room there's one other option down here I thought of so if I wanted to put it right here by our thermostat you know it's kind of a nice place right next to a bedroom where I could adjust some settings but it would be a redundancy having a thermostat here and then having the display here to change so I decided we're going to mount it right here this is kind of a central location I walk past here all the time when we leave the house I'd be able to secure the alarm system right here um but I need to get wife's approval Al also I can't have the cord coming down I already know that's not allowed so I'm going to route an ethernet cable from the basement up into here so I can put it here without having a cable be seen so let's go do that then I need to decide how high I want this I think that looks pretty good right there and then going to very strategically place the mount make sure it's level screw it in the wall now if you're going to use the included cable here you can wrap it around and mount it and this is what that would look like when you mount it on the wall all right the display is installed but not a fan of the power cable so let's go ahead and fix that I've already routed an ethernet cable up here now I just need to put it through and we're going to put a hole behind this to plug in the adapter and then we'll have it powered without a cable in the way now I'm just going to cut a hole the size of the adapter now I'm going to make sure that doesn't fall in the hole and then after a few hours of fishing the cable through you'll finally get it so here I have the cable coming up through there going to the top of this return air and then coming up all the way to the top and so now I'm going to terminate each end and here I'm going to plug that into the switch in the basement and then I'm going to plug that into the poe adapter now one thing I'm doing here is I'm putting some electrical tape on The Wire there and I'm going to put it on the screw so it doesn't fall down and then we just need to plug it into the echo Hub put it back on the mount and we have finished the install now if you don't have a network Poe you can actually pick up a waserstein Poe so this you would just plug in a ethernet cable into here and then you plug the power over ethernet cable from here into the adapter for the echo Hub and then you would receive ethernet and power when you're in Poe mode it doesn't have the Wi-Fi connected it's getting the ethernet right from here through your Internet modem whatever so another option if you do want to go the poe route and after a bit of work we now have the echo Hub installed without any cables hanging down if you have the poe option to be able to do that I think this is a great way to install this smart display because it's going to look super clean if you do want to just plug it in that's an option too you can get a cover for the cable to make it look a little better and so on so now that we have this set up and installed let's go ahead and look at some of the things you can do first let's talk about when you are not using the display so here on the screen it's showing a little screen saver it's showing the weather day of the week as well as the day of and the month and it's showing the time and up in the top it's showing that somebody's active in a friend's home now if we get close it has infrared where it's going to be able to detect when you come up to the display and it will adjust the display so here I'm about 5T away and boom it went right to the home screen of the display so now I can interact it without having to touch the screen first so here we are at our home screen now the first thing that you can do is you can adjust where things are and how things are operating so first we have this kitchen widget so I just held down on the widget and you can adjust certain things so I can remove the widget go to the widget gallery to add more and configure the widget and then rearrange the widget so if I go here I can configure what room it is going to select so that was for the kitchen we are kind of kitchen and living room I I would like to see a group of rooms together that would be really cool to have as a widget but that currently is not here so here we're just in the kitchen select done and now you see that it's showing the kitchen light so here if I tap turn off all lights it then turns off all the lights there and then we have some of the other lights and things that are in there that we can adjust so I can turn on the hood light just like that that's actually one of the lights that every time I go to bed it is still on so it's nice that I'll just be able to walk by tap that button turn it off and then I am ready to go to bed it got pretty dark in here so let's turn on all those lights again and you can see that as the lights change the display is automatically adjusting to the brightness of the room and I've also turned down the brightness pretty far just so that my camera can display the screen right right but it gets really bright even though it is dimmed a little bit here so then you can also see that one of our ring sensors is showing that the back door is closed so I know I don't need to go in and check it and then I can even adjust the shades so right now the shades are at 0% so I can come in here and do full brightness on the shades or here I can just tap the open and then the shades are going to open so that's one of the shades now they are grouped together right here I can open all the smart Shades that I have or blinds in the room so it's great that we have that and then here you'll see the three dots on each of these where I can then go to the individual items there so if I want to adjust a specific shade I can do that right on there and again you can do all of this by voice just sometimes you don't want to use your voice and come up here to display so that's just the first widget we have here second we have a camera widget now this one as soon as you see it you want to go in there and you want to configure the widget because I have a ton of cameras in my home and I didn't want all of them to show so I can go through and turn on the cameras I want to show and I can move some of them up more so that they are more at the top and now here on the home screen we can see those cameras we can tap on on a camera to view the camera let's check out our ring Battery Plus here see what's going on in the basement so I can hear what's going on down there I can talk through hey dinner will be ready in like an hour what all right so they know dinner's ready and then I also have this multi view option where you can actually view multiple cameras at the same time which is just so cool so there it's pulling up the playroom it's pulling in the front yard which fell to the ground here it's pulling up the front door as well as the sidey yard so it's really cool that I can see all the cameras at once now I do have more cameras than this it would be cool if I could swipe through all the different feeds but right now it's showing just those top cameras that I have selected so we could go to the see all cameras option and then I'm going to see all the different cameras I have here and I could choose ones I want to see so if I want to go in and check in on one of my Echo Show devices I can do that as well it's going to open up the Echo Show here I can see it's dark in the basement again I can talk through or go to multicam now if you want to do that by voice all you need to do is say Alexa show me my cameras okay and then it's going to pull up that feed of all of your cameras and it looks like some of the different cameras are being moved around hopefully there's ways to to set specifically what I want to see and so there you can see it ended up changing some of the cameras and it looks like this one the nest cameras just haven't been able to load up very quickly these other ones are Tapo cam that are working great so now let's go back home so that is the camera widget again if I want to adjust this at all we can go in and rearrange the widget if I don't want to see the room first I could rearrange it and move it um after the camera so the camera is going to show up first and if I want to remove any widgets I can come in here and turn off those options now down here I also have the option to reorganize these so if I want my security to be first I have the option to do that and so on we can put those in all the different places places and at the front you can also rearrange the order the rooms are going to show up so if I want to do configure configure allows you to change um what is actually showing so if there are some rooms here that you don't ever want to see you can totally remove those down here it looks like all these need to stay and then on the widgets I can go through and I can adjust the settings so here on the widgets I can go through and configure what those widgets are instead of just long pressing so that's what you get to organize the home screen here now let's check out some more of the widgets so if we swipe over here we can see the current weather which is great what's the weather tomorrow here's the forecast for tomorrow in orm look for showers with a high of 51° F and a low of 39° now that sounds pretty good I'll be able to hear that from across the room and even see that display which is nice and here we can even adjust you know the volume there if we want to go home so then here we have a calendar widget so if I want to see what is happening through the day I can I can just quickly scroll through I don't even need to open an app here we have some favorites so those are currently showing favorite cameras if I want to adjust this this is where I need to go into my Alexa app and adjust some of those favorites right now it's only showing cameras though I don't know if I can show more so here I have top connections for me I can swipe through and see top connections for Carrie um so it's cool that you have these different menus for people in the family and then here I can go to the edit option where I can edit the widgets there I can go through and close any of the widgets that I don't want to have anymore but then I also have the option to add more widgets so if I go to add you have a ton of widgets now available in the widget Gallery so here you can see some that I'm currently using smart home groups smart home cameras I have top audio what to watch um a ton of other widgets so this is something that I'm going to really need to play with to maximize what we can do on here I'm hoping to find some like reminders to-do list for the kids to be able to quickly check off their you know before they go out and play they need to do a few different things um here we've already added the smart home favorites here we have some new widgets that are available so animal letters so it has as much of the widgets that you'd see on the Echo Show displays here we have some more smart home widgets so I'm using those it looks like we have what is called Evo dashboard so see your current Evo home and round connected status from Evo control skill here we have music and audio and then here you have all categories so there are a ton of different categories of widgets I think this is something I'm going to have to dive into further to see more about what you can really do with these widgets cuz that's what's going to make this display really impactful instead of just another tablet in your home or another another Echo Show device how is this actually going to be useful for your family in helping you keep track of things and get things done so those are the widgets that are available right now so back here at the home I've been playing with a few different widgets here we have our shopping widget add blueberries to the shopping list I've put blueberries on your shopping list here it shows the list and we can swipe away items if we don't need them anymore um and then we can go back home here here I found some notes app so I can simply type in a note if I want to edit this um you know if I want to make a reminder for myself for later I can come in here and edit it all right then we tap done there it is so it's updated that here we have calendar and there you can see all the events that we have today and you can scroll through and see tomorrow and then you can choose the day of the week that you want you can see the list here or you can go into the daily view where it's going to show you what is happening at certain times of the day so it's great you can see all that it would be nice if I could make a lock screen where it's only showing the calendar that would be pretty cool then over here we have the kitchen widget and here we have weather cameras and more let's go ahead and see if we can add a multiple widget and see if we go into smart home here I've already added a few of these let's go and add my smart home favorites so this should pull up from the favorites that I've added in the app oh and it does give us the option to add it again awesome so now up the front we have favorites and we have groups so let's go ahead and configure a group so let's say we want to conf figure the entry way so there it's out of that group so here I can turn on these lights right here and the other lights and I can see the current status of the sensor so that's really cool here on the favorites let's see what we can adjust so if I hold down on an empty space it just lets me rearrange the favorites it doesn't let me adjust what is showing there which is weird because in the app it lets me add a bunch of favorites so it would be nice if those sync together a little bit more so here we have our favorites from the app and then here on the Hub so here you can see that I have a few different room lights but those aren't even showing then the next thing it's showing is the hood light so that is right there where I can control the um stove light there and then down here it's showing some other Echo devices that aren't showing there I'd like to be able to drop in on them easily and then it's showing some of the cameras which I can pop up so here it is showing the Echo Show 15 and the Echo Show 10 but it's not a direct representation of what's on the favorites app here and on the favorites app here and then if you have more than six devices you can't even see what's next so that's a bit of a bummer hopefully there's more integration between these so that you can have some more customizable widgets right there on the home screen now let's talk about the bottom row here so these are quick things that you can do to adjust devices in your home so right here we have security so right now my ring protect security system is disarmed so I can quickly arm it just by pressing there and I have a keypad over here so it gave me a notification that it is now armed and to make any adjustments here on the echo Hub I need to head into the Amazon app and go into the settings go to my ring alarm in the app and then I need to dis and then I need to enable disarm and then I can set an access code here and so there you can see that the echo Hub now is allowing for my access code and there we have disarmed it and here we can set the away status and then it's going to go through the arming process so that does take a minute let's see what that shows here the full minute and it's and on all my devices it's making this sound to say hey something is going to happen let's go ahead and disarm that disarmed so next we have active media so when I go into active media I can see what is playing on other speakers in the home so there we can see up on the Echo Show 8 it is currently playing a song and you can see what song it is we can adjust the volume I can even tap here and select other places that I want it to play so if I want to move that down to my Echo Show 10 I have those controls right here and so now it's playing down on the speaker in the basement and if I wanted to select a group of devices here I have the option to do upstairs so when I tap upstairs confirm it's then going to play on all the available in the upstairs so it's so cool to have the display to be able to control all of that and this display is never going to be taken over by the kids cuz they can't sit here and watch movies or anything like that it is a display up and out of the way next we have locks so if I want to see the locks I have my basement that is currently locked I can tap on there enter my access code if I want it unlocked so next we have thermostat so instead of going all the way over down the hall to the thermostat I could just quickly come here and I wanted to adjust the thermostat here and now I can see both my thermostats at the same same time if I want to make sure they're the same temperature and everything it's great that I have the option right there and you can go through I have some other devices that are showing as thermost sets but they're just temperature sensors so there you go it's nice to have that and then I can even go in further I can adjust the fan if I want it on and off so it looks like I'm not able to adjust if it's heating or cooling here I believe I can do that by voice set Loft to cooling it's set to cool and there you go I'm able to set the cool set Loft to heat it's set to heat and there it changes instantly next we have lights so here it's saying that nine lights are on which is so cool that I can just quickly see all of that I have a few lights that are currently not plugged in and so here it's saying we can control Power brightness and color for your compatible smart light so here it's showing what is that 12 lights at a time so I can go through I can see the lights that I am under right here so you can see they're blue when they're on so here I can turn on a light if I tap on the three dots it gives me a few more options I can adjust the brightness so we can turn that way up I can change it from a different shade to color so I don't have to go in and find all those details in the app or use my voice I can adjust the color right here which is pretty cool and here at the top you have the option to turn all the lights on or all the lights off next we have the camera so we've seen this before where we can view all of the different cameras so we can go through and select the one camera we want and it will then show that full screen so here let's check out the front door and there we go pretty quick to load we can talk through it turn on Multi View and keep an eye on what is happening outside next we have switches oh okay it looks like I need to adjust some switches to become lights cuz some weren't showing up in the other window so that is a good thing to look out for so here we have the main four your lights I can tap on that it's going to turn the lights off right here here and so on so you may need to adjust what is happening there I can turn off all the lights just with the Press of the button right there and I want to turn this one back on so that switches and then you also have plugs so they're separated in that so if something's not showing up where you want it to you can check out my video at the end where I show you how you can go through and reorganize your whole home and choose categories for the specific device that you are using so then we have the last option here which is other under it's going to show everything that is not one of those categories so we have some other blinds so it would be nice if there was a category for blinds but there's not one you can see the doors if it's open or closed we have other contact sensors and so on that you can go through and see but now we have all these different settings under other right there so that's an overview of the main features that you have available here you have your quick access to your rooms your widgets and then your quick access to home control there there next I want to have the ring doorbell pop up on here whenever the doorbell rings so is what I'm going to do is go into cameras here in the Alexa app and then here I'm going to go to front door tap on settings and we're going to change the announcement devices so you can see which devices are having an announcement here and which ones are not so we now need to find the echo Hub which is right here so once we check that go back now it is going to notify us when somebody Rings the door [Music] someone is at the front door and then here you can tap the mic to talk through hi how can I help you hey would you like to buy some cookies uh no we already bought Girl Scout cookies oh you do all right thanks bye next we have routines so up here we can see the routines that we have made as of right now I don't see this as like a motion routine so if in the morning I walk by it would be cool I could have my morning routine set up I don't see that yet but then we have our other routines here so if I want to close the living room Shades I can just tap on the button right there it's now going to close all of my shades so that's currently running but if I want to open the living room Shades I can press the button and then all of those are going to open so if you have a bunch of routines that's going to be really helpful and up here in the top left you have the time and the top right you have a notification about other devices uh from your family members or whoever you have in your contacts here I'm getting a notification that Grandpa's home so now let's go ahead and go into the settings so here we have home which is going to take you to the dashboard here you have the actual settings so we can go we can adjust Bluetooth we can check out our Network which we're currently wired here you can adjust your profile and your family so you can go through and check out the kid profiles and add more if you need to next we have clock and display so if you want to adjust the clock at all you can do that so here it's going to have an idle screen choose what shows on screen when you're device device is not in use so we want to have that on select clock and photo display so here we can choose do we want personalized photos modern playful or photography so here we have modern where we can go through and choose a few different options here and you can even customize there's more so a ton of things that are available there so then we have night mode so when the lights are all off it's going to still display something but in a very low light you know red on the screen so you'll be able to see that um even if the lights are off without distracting you and then you even have the 24-hour clock there so let's say we choose playful here I want to edit how it looks we can change the background or the clock face so if you want to have a big clock face you can do that you can have it down here in the corner I'm going to go ahead and choose the Big Clock face so we can see it from across the room and let's save that and now um when we go to the home screen and this locks that is what we'll display next we have display and brightness so right now you can see where my brightness is at I can crank it up right there there and you can see that's way too bright so let's turn it down and then we can do color display so if you want a more cool look you can have that so it's really blue or you can go to the more warm look where there's not going to be as much blue light coming in um I think this middle looks pretty good for now and you can adjust that as time goes on here we have adaptive brightness here we have Sunrise effects so if you wanted to have an alarm on here it would gradually brighten up the display during this time 15 minutes before the alarm alarm starts and then you can have it automatically dim um after it's not in use for 10 minutes and then here we have Auto Wake so when you get close it has that infrared where it's going to automatically wake up and we can look into the proximity detection so you could turn off that when it's muted so if the mut's on it's not going to work but here you can have that turn on and we have Auto wake and then you can also have Auto Wake when in night mode it's not going to turn on right now so it doesn't blind you and you're not used to it but if you want that you can go ahead and turn that on next we have sounds so if we want to control the media on here the alarm sounds we can turn on our ascending alarm we can adjust the equalizer here you can choose the alarm sound that you're going to have now here I have a ton of sounds because I have kid devices where I have the subscription for that you can change the notification and then you can also have it alert you when it hears that you're going to ask a request or when it ends the request so this is helpful if you need to hear a little beep before um you start talking to it or you know that it's done listening to you so you can turn those on and off here under privacy we can read all of about our voice history and we can adjust any of those settings looks like it's pulled up kind of a web page here which is cool that we could do a lot more um so you can adjust that as needed here we have do not disturb so if you don't want this to make noise when somebody Rings your doorbell or you know your kids's napping you want to come in here turn that on you can do that or you can set it scheduled so at a certain time of the day it turns off or at night this doesn't make any noise and you can have it start and end there here you have communication so um when somebody's calling you can have this become a ringer now there is no camera on this it would just be for voice calls but I have the option to turn that on and off here we have device options so if I want to change the name we can do that if we want to change where it is placed on the wall or on a counter we can do that we have our actual device location we have our language we can set the Alexa voice so here there are a few different voices you can use and then here we can change the Wake words so you have a few other options here great to see that all of them are available on this device if you want to change that up we can adjust the date and time so you can change your region or time zone you have distance so right now we are in miles so it's going to tell me in Miles how far away something is here's the proximity detection again so if we want to turn on Amazon sidewalk or learn more it's going to tell you about how to do that then here we have web options so we do have a browser on here so we could adjust the silk browser so if I want to change the settings that are available there and so we have a few other settings there next we have restrict access so if we don't want certain things to be accessed on here we can do that we could um turn off Amazon photos we could turn off web browsing web search um video providers we can go through and turn those off so here it looks like we can do Hulu and Food Network kitchen so if you want those disabled you are able to do that and then here we have calendar so right now it is accessing my calendar and we can link it to the right person so it's going to display for the family so if I want it to link to my wife's account I can have it do that so it's displaying her calendar versus showing my calendar all the time so here I can see it's linked I can add multiple calendars there as well and here it's showing the family calendar and I could have other notifications from the calendar here if you need help you can go through the help settings and it's going to talk to you about how to adjust all those things I might still need to read through all of that and then here we have accessibility so first off we have voice view screen reader so here the voice view provides spoken feedback when you touch items on the screen so that would be very helpful then we have screen magnifier we have the color inversion and we have color correction now for vision for hearing we do have captions so you can enable captions and then we also have for speech adaptive listening mode so recognizes different speech patterns like stuttering and gives you more time to finish speaking so it's not going to uh process your command as much and then we have tap to use Alexa so you can actually come up to the screen and tap to interact instead of with voice and then you have the communication without speech enable calling messaging drop in and announcements via touch and turns on transcripts for received messages and then you do have rtt enable real time text to use um for communicating during calls so great to see a full list of accessibility features there and then legal and compliance and then let's go ahead and check out what we can adjust in the Alexa app so here on the echo Hub I have volume control so I can adjust the volume and you'll see the volume adjust over here I can drop in with a voice call so I can see what is happening in the room hello can you hear me now is dinner ready hello is dinner ready so I can talk through it from here and then I can turn on and off do not disturb I have the options to add alarms and then I can adjust the photo display in the settings we can adjust the audio settings so I can change the equalizer there I can change what the default speaker is so if I want it to play on a different speaker I can do that I could pair a gadget I can change sounds do not disturb communication um all those other things that we had here here I can also turn on follow-up mode so that allows it to continue listening after it responds to one of my questions and I can adjust the photo display here to do more so you have a lot that you can do on either of the displays now here at the top we have the do not disturb we can adjust the brightness change notifications so if we want to see what are new notifications there we can find all of that information here we have alarm so we can see if there are any alarms currently set no current alarms here we can go into the photo frame and change that so let's go ahead and turn on Amazon photos and here it's saying which ones do you want which album and let's go ahead and choose your photos and we can start the photo frame and now we can see all of our awesome pictures up here which is really fun here we have communicate so we can drop in on other devices we can announce something we can call we can message and show contacts we can then look at music so if we go into music it's going to pull up Amazon music where we can see what we have recently been listening to we have video so if you do want to watch videos on here it's going to pull up some channels that we can use we can do Fire TV channels Prime video Hulu YouTube and other web applications so again if you don't want this you can disable it but it's cool that you do have the options if you want this playing in the background while you're cooking dinner or whatever you can do all that here we can go to our routines which we've seen on the routines Tab and we have the active media controls that we can adjust right there so that is pretty much all the settings that you can change on the echo hub now I mentioned before how you can connect all kinds of different Smart Home Products to the echo Hub you can do that through the Alexa app but let's show you how you can connect a zigg product directly to the hub so this is the sangled zigg light bulb so I have a brand new fixture here that I'm going to install it in so all I need to do is screw in the light bulb and then I need to ask it Alexa discover new devices starting Discovery this will take a few moments power on your new devices now and if needed put them in pairing mode so there it already started to look for the devices there it started flashing and it should have discovered it I found two new devices to connect these devices go to the Alexa app and tap on devices so there it found them let's head into the app so here in the app I found that there is now a few new light so here we has first light and if I turn that on and off that is that light so now I can go into the app give it a name and move it into a different group but now I can control it by a voice dim the first light there it turned down the rightness Alexa set first light to Blue Alexa turn off first light in 30 seconds okay I'll turn off the first light in 30 seconds so then here I can control it right from here or I can use the app to control it Ander routines and other things like that and then you can also ask to turn off the light at different times so you can use that routine and then here after 30 seconds the light will then turn off just like that so I've now added the light bulb into the room so I can come over here and we can find the kitchen lamp I can simply tap to turn that on if I tap on the three dots here I have the option to adjust the brightness and over here I can adjust the color so if I really want to find tune what the light is doing I have the option to do it right here on the screen Alexa open silk here is silk now it does have a web browser so if you are using some other platform for your smart home you might have the option to actually view your devices and control them from here now here I'm testing out home. goole.com currently I've turned off a bunch of my cameras but here you can see my cameras available let's go ahead and go into the playroom here and we can see the camera and I did the test where I left this on for an hour and it stayed on this screen so if you do want to use some other type of website for your smart home platform that might be an option if it goes away you would just need to go back into the settings and pop it back up but here you can see a live camera feed um from the basement there and that works great let's test it out from down there let's turn on the mic now if you are using like home assistant I know there's bigger dashboards that you could use that have a lot more features so this might be a great option to be able to do that if that's something that you're looking for now I do have a ton of different devices connected to my home but every once in a while I'll see this device that's saying it's not working even though clearly it works right here and I am able to adjust that light without any issues so there could be some improvements there so what's the verdict on the echo Hub well overall I think this is a pretty cool device I love that I was able to fully incorporate this into my smart home there's no wires it looks really great and so I love that I finally have a display that is able to control all of my different smart home devices overall though it is a little bit clunky and of course it's new so there's some things that are definitely missing from here now when moving things around and trying to organize things it's pretty slow so you got to be a little bit patient with it there um but then some of the other things that I think are missing is the ability to really customize what this can do now they luckily have Incorporated all the widgets where you can add some fun things to do and make it a little bit more customized but without those you wouldn't really have a smart home control panel here my brother has built his own smart home control panel with home assistant and it's crazy the amount of things that he can do he can have a camera always being displayed he can have other things that are popping up and so it would be cool if there was some more customization like that some of the things that I would like to see that I think could be incorporated on this really easily is being able to have a custom widget where I can choose exactly the rooms that I want it to show and I can see if the lights are on in that room and I can tap a button to turn off those lights instead of having to go through and see all the lights cuz sometimes I don't want all the lights I just want specific rooms and I don't want to have to go through all the rooms over here on the side it would be nice if I also had the option to incorporate specific routines into the favores cuz sometimes I just don't want to turn on and off a room I want to be able to control a routine that changes many different devices in different rooms at the same time so being able to have a favorites option where it was certain lights certain rooms certain routines would be really cool to have all inone amongst being able to control individual devices in the home so I think this is a great start um and over time I'm sure we're going to see it improve as well as the software improve and one thing I would have liked to see a camera on here it would be nice if I could drop in on here check out the kitchen have a conversation um do the video chat if I was away or whatnot but so that would be cool if it's Incorporated um not a huge deal but I would like to see that it's nice that I can drop in by voice and then I like having all the quick controls down here at the bottom and it's nice that I can see how many lights are currently on so if you have any further questions about the Amazon Echo Hub please let me know down in the comments below and if you want to see more tutorials on how you could actually incorporate this or how certain things work please let me know as well a huge thank you to Amazon for providing this to me early so I test it out as well as some of the other ring devices and if you're interested in checking one out you can click the link down in the description below thank you so much for watching we'll see you on the next one

Channel: Tech With Brett

Views: 90,548

Keywords: Tech With Brett, Amazon Echo Hub, Amazon Smart Home Display, Echo Hub POE Wiring, Echo Hub Wall Mount, Echo Hub show Ring Doorbell, Smart Home Wall Dispaly, Echo Hub Photo Display, Echo Hub Tutorial, Echo Hub Review

Id: PNOsHxb5MJE

Length: 43min 6sec (2586 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2024