Table of contents
Alexa gains a nice integration with Grubhub food delivery and Roomba cleaning robots. You just have to use your voice
The autonomous cleaning robot Roomba will get smarter with the help of Alexa. iRobot, the manufacturer behind Roomba, announced their efforts to integrate the cute round vacuum cleaners with Amazon's Alexa home assistant. The new closely knit solution will allow users to command Roomba with their voice.
Ordering Roomba around promises to be a fun experience together with the newly announced updates to its apps both for Android and Apple devices. Roomba can now build more precise clean maps and informative cleaning reports, too.
This represents an interesting trend of tighter interconnection with other devices that contribute to a smart home experience. For instance, the latest Clean Map feature identifies the dirtiest places in the house and calculates total cleaned area.
The new features mark iRobot's dedication towards faster development of smart devices. Roomba 900 series focus on visualization of cleaning areas and communication with one another and third-party IoT gadgets like Alexa.
For now, integration with Alexa is limited to commands to start, suspend, or abort cleaning and will be released in the second quarter of 2017 for US only.
Another news of interesting integration with Amazon's device comes from Grubhub. The food delivery service can repeat any of the last 3 orders through Alexa. If a user wants to order something new, they will still have to go directly to Grubhub service.
Although these integrations could mark the beginning of a new development stage in smart home services, they are still just baby steps in the right direction.
Update: July 9, 2020
