For IFTTT, I don’t do a lot, but combined with our Android phones (no iOS here, sorry) there’s some useful (but mostly stupid) things I have set up.
“Alexa, trigger (my or my wife’s) phone” causes our phone to ring so we can find it.
(There’s some rather klugey ways of using triggers to send preset “I’m home” type texts using Echo’s existing “Shopping list” or “To do” list functionality, but there’s no method of having it dictate a text (yet)).
“Alexa, trigger nightlight” sets my one smart lightbulb (a LIFX color one in our kitchen dining area) to a 1% soft light.
On the stupid side of things: “Alexa, trigger Italian Restaurant” sets the same light bulb to soft reddish. (Then “Alexa, Italian Dinner playlist” has the Echo kick in to “O Solo Mio”, et al from a playlist I set up on Spotify.) I have set this up with several combinations of stereotypical restaurant lighting / music scenarios, that get triggered by me when we have anything from frozen pizza (Italian) to Fish sticks (“Trigger seafood restaurant”). It turns out I’m really an annoying person to live with.
At 7 am and pm, triggers turn that same light to Green–non-obtrusively telling us it’s our dog Lucky’s feeding time (“Alexa, trigger Lucky has been fed” turns it back to soft white).
When my wife gets home, a trigger tied to her phone’s location changes the light to bright pink. (She’s not amused, but again–“annoying to live with.”) I have a lot of various other light triggers set up too useless to list.
There’s tons of recipes that involve Echo, phones (ios and android), smart light bulbs, smart watches, etc. at the IFTT site. I plan to eventually get a smart thermostat, and smart lock for our front door, which should really ramp up my annoying trigger abilities to divorce-threatening level proportions. Can’t wait!
Kitchen is medium sized? (It’s about 20 feet from where the Echo is to the far side. It always hears you from anywhere in the kitchen, and other people talking isn’t an issue–though if it’s already playing music, sometimes you do have to raise your voice and try a couple of times before it picks it up. (If the music’s REALLY loud, you sometimes do end up shouting “ALEXA, STOP”, or waiting for a quiet point, or just walking over and spinning down the volume manually to get it to hear you.)
