One of the things I wanted to do with my Amazon Echo was to have Alexa control items around my house. What better place to start than with my TV?! To make this happen, all you need is a Harmony Hub and your Echo or Echo Dot.

See the Harmony Hub and Alexa in Action

In this quick video, I give you a glimpse into how to use the Logitech Harmony Hub with Alexa to control your TV.

I also show my first unboxing of the unit so you can see exactly what comes with it and how it looks.

Then I demonstrate all of the components working beautifully together.

How it all works together

It’s important to understand how the various components work together and sometimes it gets difficult, especially with all of the terms used by each manufacturer.

Here is a high-level overview of how the various components work together to control your TV with your voice.

Here are the steps to make magic

Let’s walk through the major steps needed to make all of this loveliness happen…

1. Get an Echo or Echo Dot

This will serve as your central voice-command station for controlling whatever you want to control in your smart home. You can get either an Echo or an Echo Dot, it’s your choice. You could also use something like the Google Home device as well but I prefer the Echo at this point.

2. Get a Harmony Hub

I looked around quite a bit for devices and I kept hearing good things about the Harmony Hub. I chose this device and so far everything has worked great.

To help you understand what it is, think about it this way. The Harmony Hub basically acts like a remote control working with your TV and cable box. So, just like when you set up a universal remote to find your devices and control them, the hub works the same way.

It can also work with your A/V equipment, your Amazon Fire Stick, and many other devices.

3. Configure your Harmony Hub

Now that you have a Harmony Hub and it’s plugged in, it’s time to configure that bad boy. The cool thing is you can configure it all via your phone.

Download the Harmony Hub app.

Launch the app and Set Up a New Hub

Create your Logitech account

Add your devices. This part is pretty cool. If you remember the old days of programming a universal remote, then you remember the pain of cycling through various codes until the right one worked. The app takes all of that pain away and now all you have to do is type in the manufacturer and model and it will find your device and work with it automatically.

Here are the devices I added to begin with.

Now add the activities you want. Here are the standard activities the app provides initially.

You can add a custom activity like I did to enable the components to automatically turn on the TV and turn the channel to CNN.

4. Configure Alexa to work with your Harmony Hub

Now that the Harmony Hub is all set, you just need to configure Alexa to work with it. Open up the Alexa app on your phone and touch the little hamburger icon in the corner. Then select Skills from the drop down menu.

Select the Harmony skill. I chose the Red version below.

Enable the channels you want to control with your voice. The Friendly Names allow you to call the channel what you want to call it. For instance, instead of saying “ESPNHD”, you can simply use the Friendly Name “ESPN”.

And now you are all set to go! Enjoy playing with your new toy!