D-Link announced yesterday that you can now control your mydlink enabled devices with your Amazon Echo. This is great news for anyone with D-Link smart home devices such as the D-Link Smart Plug, or one of my favorite pieces of smart home gadgetry gone awry, the D-Link Wifi Siren.
One thing to note, I think many sites are misreporting this as being a Device Link, like Nest, Wemo, Wink, Lutron, ecobee, etc. The Alexa/D-Link integration is accomplished by adding the mydlink skill, rather than linking your accounts. This is important because although the functionality is similar, you have to invoke your commands in a different manner. In order to interact with your D-Link devices, you will have to say “Alexa, ask mydlink to ______” which is slightly more wordy than “Alexa, turn on ______.”
Devices linked by skills also have the drawback of not being able to be added to groups in the Alexa app. Since Alexa cannot see the individual devices, you will have to interact with each D-Link device individually, rather than adding them to your existing groups. While this is a drawback, it is still better than not being able to control them at all.
While I am not a huge fan of D-Link’s line of products, I am always happy to see Alexa gain control of more devices, and useful skills added to the Skills library.