We’re delighted to announce that you can now access your FloatHub data with Alexa. In less than a minute, you can enable the FloatHub skill and link your account to it.
Setting Things Up
If you don’t already have the Alexa App on your smartphone, you’ll need to download it from your App Store in order to configure the connection with FloatHub. In the Skills section, click on the search icon:
Search for “FloatHub”, click on the FloatHub skill, and then select “Enable to Use”:
For Alexa to be able to access your FloatHub data, you need to authorize it. Note that we only share data about the current status of your vessel, not your personal information such as address, payment details, and so on. You perform this authorization by entering your username and password for the FloatHub website in the screen that the Alexa App will present you with:
That’s it and you are good to go. You can now say, “Alexa, open FloatHub”.
Questions to Ask
You can ask FloatHub about 4 basic categories of information:
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“Alexa, ask Floathub where the boat is” - Alexa will let you know current status and location of your boat, including what geographical feature it is close to (island, town, marina, etc.), whether it is moving or stationary, reported depth, and so on.
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“Alexa, ask FloatHub about the current conditions” - This request will relay weather related data about the current air temperature, barometric pressure, and wind/water data if they are currently available from an external NMEA source on your vessel.
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“Alexa, ask FloatHub what the electrical levels are” - This will report current voltage levels for any of your connected batteries, chargers, etc. Note that it will not report any voltages for devices that are currently set to “Ignore” on the FloatHub website.
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“Alexa, ask FloatHub about pump activity” - This will give you a summary of pump activity for the past 7 days (independent of your FloatHub subscription).
Availability
FloatHub data via Alexa is available now for all service plan levels. There is no (additional) cost associated with this functionality.
Feedback and Other Device Support
This is the very first release of a voice related app for FloatHub, so we are deeply interested in as much user feedback as possible. Please send us your thoughts on what you like, what could be improved, etc. Also, we are planning to use much of the same back end that was used to build out Alexa support to add similar support for IFTTT and Google Home support. Please feel free to tell us which you would rather see first.