Get the Perfect Sleep Pattern With Alexa’s “Wait” Action
I am a big fan of subroutines, i.e. digital subroutines, because they are convenient for running a series of actions without having to manually configure everything every time you want to do something.
Consider one of my favorite things to do — taking a nap. Instead of getting up, turning off the lights, playing soothing music (or thunderstorm sounds ) to block out the outside world, and turning on the fan in my room, I can simply shout a command to my Amazon Echo or Google Home and do it all for me. TA-dah.
Thanks to a recent tweet from Ry Crist from CNET, I learned that Amazon now supports latency in its procedures. In other words, you can insert a large amount of time between your actions, allowing you to get even more creative with your customized routines. This is the dream of the daytime sleep enthusiast.
How to set up pending actions in Alexa routines
Continuing with this sleep example, setting up a new sleep mode on your Echo is incredibly easy. Open the Alexa app on your smartphone (alas, not the Alexa web interface ), tap the three-line hamburger icon in the upper left corner to open the sidebar, tap Routines and tap the plus sign in the upper-right corner to create something new.
Creating a routine is a fairly straightforward process: create a trigger – such as a voice command or a scheduled time – and add all the actions your Echo device needs to do in sequential order, such as turning off the bedroom light when you want to close your eyes.
Alexa’s new “Wait” action is great because you can now give yourself a built-in timer to take a nap. For example, you can create a routine that immediately turns off all the lights in your room and turns on a sleep playlist for a few minutes to help you fall asleep. Then you can add a Wait action for the amount of time you would normally sleep — say thirty minutes — and add another action after that, such as starting your favorite song to wake up, turning on the lights, or turning on the echo. just say, “Hey, wake up.” If you usually sleep for a certain amount of time or want to stick to this habit, it is much easier to create such a routine instead of setting a timer on your smartphone every time you are about to temporarily return.
As for other procedures that may benefit from the delay, I will leave that to you. I’ll probably set out my standard morning routine to check the weather as soon as I wake up, but get the morning news 30 minutes later when I’m less sleepy. If only the subroutines supported whisper mode ; I could really scare my roommates with some of Alex’s delayed phrases.