If you’re like me and have an Amazon Echo in nearly every room of your house (and if you do, make sure you’re taking advantage of having multiple Amazon Echos in your home), you know how great it is to have ambient AI in every room. If you happen to own one of the Echos that contains a camera, there’s a facial recognition feature called Visual ID that can recognize the face of everyone in your family (if you set it up right) so that Alexa can take action when it “sees” a certain member of your family or household. This is a very powerful feature that will make your smart home even smarter.
How to set up Visual ID
You’ll first have to do a facial scan
The prerequisite here is that you must own an Echo that has a camera from 2021 and onward (you can see a full list of compatible devices on the Amazon Echo website), and it’s important to place the Echo in a central location where it can “see” your family as they walk by — in my case, the Echo Show 10 in my kitchen is in such a location where it can see.
I turned my old tablet into a smart home dashboard, and it’s perfect
I use my 1st-gen iPad Pro as a smart home dashboard
How to enroll your family in Visual ID
Requires a quick facial scan
Then, you must set up a profile for everyone in your family that you want Alexa to recognize which you can do in the Alexa app by going to Settings -> Your Family. Once you set up your family, you are ready to set up Visual ID with your compatible Echo and do the facial scan by going to Settings -> Your profile & family -> [Tap on the family member] -> Visual ID, set up now. It’s important to note that Visual ID was created with security in mind, as the facial scans never go to the cloud and happen entirely on-device. Not only that, but if you set up a child’s profile with Visual ID, the Echo will transform into a “Kids Edition” when it sees the child, which means it’ll block out certain apps and filter out content with explicit material.
Here’s why it’s cool
Letting Alexa “see” has several cool use cases
One of the cool things about Visual ID is that it’s smart enough to recognize someone even if the person isn’t looking directly at the Echo Show. It can recognize people walking by even if the camera only gets to “see” a profile view of the person.
To get Alexa to perform an action (or a series of actions, as a Routine, which we’ll cover) when it sees someone in your family, you just ask it:
- Reminders/Notes: “When you see [Brandon] next, leave a note for him to take the trash out” — this will prompt the Echo to both show a note on-screen when it sees Brandon, and deliver an audio message to “take the trash out.”
- Routines: “When you see [Olivia], run the [Daily Morning] routine” and you can customize a routine to do a variety of things, like announce a message “Good morning!” and tell the current time, activate devices in your smart home, announce the weather or traffic, read the news, and more. All of this can be configured in the Alexa app so that your routines have a series of actions that make sense when the Echo sees someone in your family.
Adding routines in the Alexa app
Customize the perfect sequence of events
There are 22 different actions a routine can perform — including all of your smart home devices. Imagine setting up your Echo Show to turn on your kitchen lights and toggle on your coffee maker (perhaps with a little robot) when it first sees you or your partner (“Alexa, when you see [person] start [morning coffee routine]”). To customize a routine or add a new one, go to the Alexa app, click the three dot menu -> Routines -> Your Routines -> Plus icon to add new.
You give up some privacy
The camera shutter must remain open
Every Amazon Echo Show has a camera shutter switch that physically blocks the camera. On my Echo Show devices, I like keeping this closed as I don’t want an always-on camera in my house that could potentially be used to spy on my family. But if you want to use Visual ID on the Echo (which, again, keeps facial recognition data on-device and not in the cloud), you need to technically keep the camera shutter open at all times for it to be able to “see”. It’s up to you whether this slight security risk is worth it, but if you decide it is, there are so many cool automations you can run with your Echo Show when you give it the ability to see everyone in your household even if they are just walking by.
