Reprint: 4 Tips from eWeLink to Improve Smart Home Quality

Since 2015, CoolKit – the parent company behind eWeLink – has worked closely with Amazon’s Alexa team to deliver engaging smart home experiences for customers. eWeLink offers turnkey solutions that have empowered over 2,000 smart home device manufacturers to seamlessly integrate connectivity and intelligence into their products. Those manufacturers in turn have delivered quality smart home experiences to 30+ million customers worldwide.

We sat down with Weihua Wang, CoolKit’s Chief Operating Officer (COO), to uncover the importance of smart home quality and the steps eWeLink has taken to elevate and sustain exceptional quality, paving the way for seamless customer experiences.

At the heart of delivering delightful smart home experiences lies device state quality – a critical metric that measures the real-time responsiveness and reliability of connected devices. A component of that is state accuracy, which reflects the actual status of a smart device (e.g., whether a light is on or off). Inaccurate state reporting can lead to frustrating scenarios where a customer’s device is in a state that’s not reflected by the connected smart assistant, such as a light that’s turned on but not acknowledged by Alexa.

With this in mind, eWeLink worked with Alexa to develop four best practices to improve device state quality:

Tip #1: Be up-to-date with Works with Alexa (WWA) requirements: WWA is a certification program that raises the bar on responsiveness, reliability, and functionality, ensuring customers have the best smart home experiences. eWeLink has helped device manufacturers obtain the WWA badge, which in turn increases customer confidence in their products, and drives traffic to their products on Amazon and offline channels. It doesn’t stop with just supporting WWA but has implemented a robust process of regularly reviewing the WWA requirements, ensuring that it stays in-sync with current quality benchmarks, and also any new standards or technical changes on the horizon. Moreover, eWeLink maintains constant communication with the Alexa team, particularly the WWA specialists, to proactively identify and address any systemic irregularities in device state quality. This proactive approach allows eWeLink to quickly adapt to emerging indicators and make preemptive adjustments.

Tip #2: Send Change Reporting promptly: eWeLink ensures that when the status of a connected device changes – whether due to an Alexa voice command, control via the app, or physical interaction with the device – it immediately reports that change to the eWeLink server and the eWeLink server, in turn, will instantly notify the Alexa cloud. By consistently delivering state updates in under 600 milliseconds, eWeLink guarantees that Alexa always reflects the real-time status of connected devices, eliminating the risk of discrepancies that could lead to customer frustration.

Tip #3: Respond to Alexa directives (ReportState, Alexa.Response) promptly: When a customer interacts with the Alexa app or an Amazon Echo device, the ReportState directive is sent to the eWeLink cloud, requiring the connected device to provide a synchronous response through a comprehensive state report covering all its functionalities. Crucially, eWeLink also guarantees that the context object within the Alexa.Response includes the up-to-date status of any changed device properties. This not only confirms that the customer’s command was properly executed, but also validates the device’s responsiveness based on the Alexa.EndpointHealth status. By consistently delivering prompt, precise responses to Alexa’s directives, eWeLink eliminates any disconnects between the smart assistant and the connected devices, ensuring a seamless, frictionless smart home experience for customers.

Tip #4: Review state quality across different device types and use cases: eWeLink regularly conducts in-depth reviews of state quality performance across its entire product portfolio, meticulously analyzing the unique requirements of different device categories. This granular, device-specific approach allows eWeLink to rapidly identify and address any quality issues that may arise within particular product types. The company also closely monitors state reporting patterns across common, high-frequency smart home use cases. For instance, eWeLink is aware that millions of customers rely on their smart home devices to set timers and routines, especially during peak periods like mornings and evenings. By optimizing the state reporting processes for these mission-critical use cases, eWeLink ensures exceptional performance without compromising the overall customer experience.

The above best practices have resulted in a proactive state update (PSU) accuracy rate of >98% across eWeLink devices. “Due to regular measurement and optimization, we have managed to achieve the highest quality of connection between eWeLink and its devices.” says Weihua. “Since the devices are all based on AWS cloud services, there is also better connection between eWeLink and Alexa, which helps improve and maintain high state quality scores.”.

United by their shared mission of making smart home easy, eWeLink and Alexa will continue to work to bring the best experience possible to customers. “The Alexa team has consistently demonstrated an openness to collaboration that we truly appreciate,” says Weihua.

Review the state reporting examples for more details.

Disclaimer: This article was republished from the Amazon Alexa Developer Blog with permission. You can find the original article on this link.