How to Enable Hunches to Make Alexa Do Your Tasks Automatically

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(Pocket-lint) – Last year, Amazon rolled out an Alexa feature called Hunches. It allows the assistant to proactively perform household chores for you without having to ask permission. Alexa will perform hunts, like automatically turning off your lights, based on your habits and past requests.

What is an Alexa hunch?

Alexa has long been able to observe your activity to suggest further actions, whether it’s a follow-up question or playing a video or song. Now, with proactive hunts enabled, Alexa can make suggestions for your smart home devices.

The idea is this: if you left a smart device on, Alexa can offer to turn it off for you. For example, if one of your smart lights is on when you say “night”, Alexa will notify you and offer to turn it off. Alexa can hunker down on a variety of supported smart home devices, from lights and thermostats to doors and switches. You can also allow Alexa to automatically act on hunches for you.

Insights make Alexa more useful and are supposed to reduce the number of times you need to talk to the assistant to complete tasks around the house.

How to Enable Alexa Insights

Hunts are enabled by default. This means that Alexa will always ask you to act on a hunch. If you want Alexa to act on her hunches without having to ask you first, you’ll need to enable “automatic actions” in the Alexa mobile app. For example, you can ask Alexa to turn off the lights when you sleep or adjust the thermostat when you’re away. Just follow these steps to fully enable the feature:

Configure Alexa to Take Actions Based on Hunches

1. Open the Alexa app.
2. Open More > select Settings.
3. Scroll down and select Hunters.
4. Select Configure automatic actions.
5. Select the hunts you want Alexa to take action on.

To completely disable Hunches, just dive into the Alexa app (More > Settings > Hunches).

When will the Hunches feature be available?

The feature began rolling out in the United States on January 25, 2021.

Written by Maggie Tillman.