Not sure how to connect your HONITURE Q6 with Alexa? Yep, I know the feeling but read on to find out how to fix it. Alexa, the voice assistant from Amazon, is a great way to control your home automation devices. If you have a HONITURE Q6 vacuum robot, you can connect it with Alexa using this easy workaround. In this article, we will explain how to do that and show you some of the benefits of doing so.
I didn’t know HONITURE before but I wanted to buy a vacuum robot at the last Amazon Prime Day and I wanted one that works with Alexa and can be connected to the existing smart home network, so I could use voice commands on the vacuum. HONITURE wrote in their product title that it could work with Alexa, but it was simply not true. To me this is fraud and I was close to returning the product.
However, because I use several smart home apps to control devices, by accident I found a way to make this work. But, dear HONITURE, no thanks to you. Your support doesn’t answer in your app and neither does it reply to emails. So in general, I would not recommend getting a HONITURE device but in case you already got it now, I’m happy to share with you how you can connect it to Alexa.
How can I connect the HONITURE Q6 to Alexa?
The most important step to connect your HONITURE Q6 with the app to your Alexa is simple but it’s not easy to guess. Forget about the HonySmart app from HONITURE. Instead, use the Smart Life app from Tuya. All these smart home apps are pretty much the same and white-labeled, but not all work equally well. The advantage here is that you can use the Smart Life app together with the HONITURE Q6 vacuum robot, but beyond that, it’s also perfectly capable of connecting to Alexa with the Smart Life Skill on the Alexa Skill “store”.
Truth be told, if you have a few smart home devices already, then it’s likely that you are already using the app and the skill anyway and only need to ass the vacuum robot. It might sound strange to try to connect a product from a different manufacturer, but they all work with the same standards and there will be not a single feature missing like this, on the contrary, you gain the connection from the HONITURE Q6 to Alexa and you’ll be able to use voice commands to start the vacuuming or to send it back home to the charging station.
Step-by-step guide
In case you’re not familiar with the steps, check out this quick tutorial:
- Make sure you have the Alexa app installed on your smartphone.
- Install the Tuya “Smart Life” app (blue house icon) from your app store.
- Register, if you don’t have an account, and log in to the “Smart Life” app.
- Follow the screen instructions to add the vacuum robot (smart sweeping robot) and connect it.
- Open your Alexa app.
- Navigate to the Alexa Skills page and search for “Smart Life”.
- Activate the “Smart Life” skill by clicking “enable to use”.
- A page will load up. Enter your Tuya Smart Life account credentials now.
- Once logged in, click the “Authorize” button.
- A confirmation page will be shown now.
- If the devices haven’t been found automatically by Alexa already, do a quick manual search for new devices. If not directly shown, force close and re-open the Alexa app, or wait for a little (up to 20 minutes).
- The vacuum robot should now show up and you can give it a new name in Alexa or Smart Life if you want to call it by a shorter name for voice commands.
- You’re done now. You can now use your HONITURE Q6 vacuum robot connected to Alexa.
This is it
This is how it’s done HONITURE, thanks for nothing, despite advertising that you can connect to Alexa natively, while you’re aware that you can’t. And Tuya, thanks for covering on top of your own products. I hope this guide helped you, but the most important thing is simply to throw the HonySmart app away and use the Smart Life app instead, which looks the same and does the same thing plus Alexa connectivity.
This workaround might work as well for other models from HONITURE or completely different manufacturers but I have only tried it for the HONITURE Q6 vacuum robot and doing it like this it could connect to Alexa just fine. In case you want to watch a video tutorial about this, you can check out the clip “How to Link Smart Life App with Amazon’s Alexa (Outdoor Plug)” from the Home Tech DIY YouTube channel. Just think of a vacuum robot instead of an outdoor plug but the steps to connect the Smart Life app to Alexa are the same.
YouTube: How to Link Smart Life App with Amazon’s Alexa (Outdoor Plug)
Photo credit: All images shown were taken by Christopher Isak for TechAcute.
