iRobots vacuum cleaners are Alexa-enabled now

Puresight Systems, the exclusive distributor of iRobot's products in India announced the integration of Amazon Alexa and IFTTT(If This Then That) with iRobot's Wi-Fi enabled vacuum cleaning devices. The latest skills will be available in iRobot's products including Roomba 695, Roomba 895, Roomba 960, Roomba 966, and Roomba 980 – and can be availed by both new and existing customers.

As part of the integration, customers with Amazon Alexa devices can control their Roomba robot vacuum with voice commands. Amazon Alexa has released a skill that will allow users to start, stop and dock their Roomba robot vacuums.

Additionally, the company has also introduced a new functionality in the home robots in collaboration with IFTTT (If This Then That), a web-based service that creates simple conditional statements. The IFTTT functionality enables Roomba devices to start, pause, or stop cleaning based on conditional statements set up by the user such as ‘When I answer a call, pause Roomba’, ‘start cleaning before an event on the calendar’, or ‘play music on the Android device after cleaning home.' The iRobot IFTTT applets enable Roomba customers to further automate their daily cleaning needs alongside hundreds of web-based apps and smart devices.

“The integrations with Amazon Alexa and IFTTT are aimed at simplifying the user experience for our burgeoning ultramodern clientele in India. The feature rollout was initiated to maximize the efficiency of connected Roomba devices and to make them more intuitive and convenient for the end-consumer to use. We are confident that these two features will stand out in the Indian market and help in further popularizing Roomba devices amongst urban consumers,” Pulak Satish Kumar, COO Puresight Systems said.

Existing users are required to run software patches on their Roomba home vacuums to make these state-of-the-art features available to them.