At its annual fall event on Wednesday, Amazon showed off a new way to control all of your compatible smart home devices: It's called “Map View,” and it'll be available first in the US later this year on select smartphones, specifically LiDAR-equipped iOS devices.
You can use your smartphone to create a digital floor plan of your home, and the map view will show all the devices you've added. Instead of using Alexa or other apps to manage your devices, you can see where the devices are in your home and tap to (for example) turn on a light, increase the volume on your Echo speaker, or change the temperature. The map view can also show live camera feeds.
It seems to be a pretty clear and intuitive user interface: Firstly, you don't have to remember the names of all your devices, just where they are in your house.
Amazon says it's an opt-in experience, allowing you to decide which rooms to add to your floor plan and which devices to include, and you can remove a floor plan at any time.
You can set up map view in the Alexa app on iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max, 13 Pro and Pro Max, 14 Pro and Pro Max, 15 Pro and Pro Max, and all iPad Pro models.
On a related note, avid readers may remember that Amazon is trying to acquire iRobot (and has been doing so for over a year now). Some Roomba devices are capable of creating maps of your home to help with cleaning. It's not hard to imagine how that could be integrated into Map View.
Follow all the news from Amazon's 2023 Devices event live here.
Updated Sept. 20, 12:52 p.m.: Added details about compatible iOS devices.