Spring into Action: A Guide to Smart Home Spring Cleaning with Josh!
As winter thaws with summer on the horizon, spring serves as a time to revitalize the smart home and prepare for the next phase of the year. Spring cleaning is a great opportunity to rejuvenate, declutter, and organize your connected living spaces. From adjusting daily routines, to replacing and updating your smart devices, there’s no better time to refresh your living spaces. Let’s embrace the season and dive into the world of smart home spring cleaning!
Remove or Update Scenes
Our daily routines can evolve due to a variety of factors, like changes in the weather, work schedules, or personal updates. For instance, during the winter months, the colder temperatures and shorter days may make it more appealing to wake up earlier and get a head start on the day. On the other hand, during the summer, warmer temperatures and longer daylight hours may encourage a more relaxed wake-up time.
Similarly, our leisure activities can also change throughout the year. When it’s cold, we may prefer to spend more time indoors watching TV or reading. During the warmer months, we may want to take advantage of outdoor activities like hiking or hosting pool parties. By leveraging Josh as a home intelligence system, it can help adjust your routines and preferences accordingly through custom scenes with unique conditionals.
For instance, suppose you have a Josh scene that’s optimized for the winter months, but you want to make it more suitable for the summer. This may involve tweaking various activations, such as adjusting the thermostat setting in your home or altering your wake-up time depending on the weather outside. These factors are all worth considering when spring cleaning your smart home experience.
Delete Old Devices
When it comes to spring cleaning your living spaces, it’s not uncommon to end up with devices that are no longer in use or have been disconnected. Devices like holiday lights and smart switches were fun to help celebrate the season, but can create unnecessary clutter in your home and in the Josh app. Not only is it visually unappealing to see offline devices on a user interface, it can also cause confusion when asking Josh to “turn on the lights” in some instances.
One way to give your Josh app a fresh, uncluttered look is by manually deleting these unused devices. This will not only help you clean up your space, but also streamline your home automation system to make it more efficient.
In addition, removing these unused devices can create room for new devices that can better suit your needs and preferences. It’s a great opportunity to upgrade your Josh system and make your living space even more convenient and comfortable.
Restart Malfunctioning Devices
It’s not uncommon to encounter challenges with devices going offline in your smart home. This can be caused by a variety of factors, including a poor internet connection, products that have lost connection to a WiFi access point, or any other device malfunction.
Even with the best installation, you may still encounter devices that go offline from time to time. In these cases, it’s worth trying some basic troubleshooting steps before calling in a professional. Restarting or resetting a device is often an effective first step. This can be as simple as turning it off and on again, or using the device’s reset button or app to restore it to its factory settings.
Spring cleaning is a great time to perform some basic maintenance to get ahead of any future issues. Hopefully, some minor oversight and due diligence helps save you from calling in a technician to tackle a larger issue down the road.
Upgrade Device Software
One of the most convenient aspects of Josh is its ability to control various devices from one contextual voice and intuitive app interface. However, to keep individual devices working as expected, you often need to update their respective applications manually. An important spring cleaning tip is to open the app associated with each device in your home and download any available updates.
For example, if you use Josh to control any Sonos devices in your home, you must access the Sonos app to update them. This process applies to any other connected devices that you control with your Josh system. It’s important to keep all of your devices running the latest software since Josh is constantly working with its partners to update its integrations accordingly. Product updates will help with bug fixes, performance improvements, and new features that enhance the user experience.
It’s important to note that Josh, among other smart devices receive frequent over-the-air updates, meaning that the updates are delivered directly to the device without the need for manual intervention. However, it’s still important to check for updates manually, as some updates may not be delivered over-the-air or may require manual confirmation to install.
Revise Device & Room Names
If you’re new to Josh or haven’t reviewed your aliases in a while, now is a great time to check your chat history to see how your family has been referring to rooms and devices. You or your installer may have programmed names that seemed fitting initially, but there will surely be adjustments to make as your household gets more comfortable interacting with Josh.
For instance, you could have a light in your living room that you named “Living Area Floor Lamp” when you first set it up. However, over time you realize that you and your family members refer to it as the “Couch Lamp” more often. In this case, adding the alias or changing the name of the device to “Living Area Couch Lamp” is an easy update that can be made in the Josh app. Thanks to Josh’s awareness of proximity, it’ll also allow anyone to say a command like, “turn on the lamp near the couch,” for extra natural language flexibility!
By taking the time to ensure that your devices and rooms are properly updated, your Josh experience will continue getting even easier and more magical!
Prior to making significant updates to your system or purchasing new devices to use with Josh, we encourage you to reach out to our team at sales@josh.ai for recommendations. We would also love to hear how you are using Josh to adapt to the spring and summer. Let us know if you have any additional tips or tricks that we can share with our community!
Josh.ai is an artificial intelligence agent for your home. If you’re interested in learning more, visit us at https://josh.ai.
