Amazon’s Alexa has been enabled to turn off your lights and close your garage already. Now it can also make your house smell like a flower garden.
Calling itself a “scenting services company,” Prolitec, announced on Monday that its Aera fragrance systems can now be voice controlled through the Amazon Echo smart speaker and other Alexa-compatible devices.
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The Aera systems offer eight different fragrances, each suitable for a particular mood, which range from pink grapefruit to basmati rice. The fragrance capsules can operate 24 hours a day and run for a full 60 days.
You can instruct Alexa to turn Aera on, have Alexa raise or lower the scent levels, or ask what the current scent levels are set on. If you already own an Aera, you can get it to work with Alexa just by enabling the Aera skill in your Amazon Alexa app.
Aera is only the latest attempt to offer smart scents. In the 1950’s Hans Laube invented a ” Smell-O-Vision ” system for automated odour releases during movies. (Because who wouldn’t want to smell King Kong as he swings through New York?) And for the last 20 years, various companies have experimented with digitised scents that could be embedded in email or web pages.
Although the Aera for Alexa command probably isn’t quite what Laube was envisioning, it is yet another step forward for total smart home integration.