Smart home gadgets exist to make your life easier, but there's one way they almost universally make it harder: setup. It's easy to say "turn on the kitchen lights," but more complicated to get everything on the right Wi-Fi connection and grouped for that convenience. That is, unless you use Alexa. Turns out, you can add devices to groups with just your voice.Of note, the current help page for creating device groups actually makes no mention of this functionality. So far as we can tell, it was silently revealed via the latest Echo newsletter:

• "Alexa, add the lamp to the living room group."Organize your smart home devices into groups and control them all with one command. Just ask to create a group or add and remove devices from your smart home group.

I don't have much in the way of Alexa-compatible lights or switches to confirm the full workflow, but attempting to add a device verbally via the app indicates the functionality is present, though we aren't entirely sure when it went live.

Either way, grouping Alexa-compatible hardware should be a whole lot easier now.

Source: Amazon