SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 31 ― Yesterday, Amazon rolled out three new Alexa features designed to let smart home device owners schedule wake-up lighting, set sleep timers and arrange lighting routines.

Better late than never: Amazon finally gave Alexa the ability to set wake-up lighting alarms, schedule sleep timers, and select routine dimming and brightening levels for users' smart lighting devices.

Inexplicably, these features already existed but could not be used together. Nevertheless, all are compatible as of yesterday.

Now you can ask Alexa to turn off your living room lights in an hour or schedule an alarm by saying "Set a daily alarm for 8AM with my bedroom lights every day.” Along with these routines, you can also brighten or dim lights to custom levels, and select how long it takes for the lighting to adjust to the specified level.

While these features are certainly not revolutionary in the smart home device world ― the Philips Hue app has offered such control for some time ― they are new to Alexa. The new features are expected to start rolling out to US Echo users this week. ― AFP-Relaxnews