Use Cortana To Control Your Smart Home Appliances

The world is becoming Smart—be it Smartphone, Smarthome, Smart TV or smart digital assistants. Our entire life is revolving around innovation and change. Every gadget or electronic appliance we use plays a crucial role in our lifestyle.

Voice assistants have surely made our life easy. Whether Siri, Alexa or Cortana, they’re all a part of our tech centric world. Talking of Windows 10, Cortana does a lot of stuff but most of us think it is not as capable as Alexa or Google Home. But did you know you could use Cortana to control your smart home appliances? Yes, you heard that right! You can use Cortana to turn On/Off your devices with quick voice commands. Not just this, you can do a lot more than that. Let’s take a quick tour and see how Cortana can control your Smart home devices.

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How To Connect Smart Home Accounts To Cortana

To connect and control your smart home devices with Cortana follow these quick steps:

1. Open the Windows 10 start menu and start typing anything to launch Cortana.
   
2. Now in the left side menu bar, select the third icon from top (notebook shaped).
   
3. Among the various available options tap on “Connected Home”.
   
4. A new “Connected Home” menu will appear. Toggle this switch to enable Cortana manage your smart home devices.
5. Next, you will be prompted to sign in to your Microsoft account. Go ahead fill up the boxes with your credentials.
   
6. Once you’re logged in to your Microsoft account you will see a list of compatible smart home compatibles like Wink, Hue, Nest, Insteon etc.
   
7. Pick any one of the listed service to proceed further.
8. Tap on Connect.
   
9. Here you need to log in to the corresponding service account to move further.
   
10. Once you’re successfully logged in you’ll be headed back to the Cortana menu and here you’ll view a “Disconnect” button indicating that you have been connected to the respective service.
    
11. To use any service tap on the mic icon and simply say any command.
    

If all goes well, Cortana will process your voice command and take the necessary action. Surprisingly cool isn’t it?

Next Read: 5 Hidden Amazon Echo Features You Probably Didn’t Know About!

We hope Cortana adds more such services in near future! In the meantime you can try these and flaunt in front of your friends and let them know how cool your Cortana can act.