How to set up and use Alexa sound detection: soothe crying babies, barking dogs and noisy snorers

1. Open the Alexa app

To get started, open the app and tap on the More button at the bottom, then tap on Routines.

2. Create a routine

This is where your routines live, if you’ve made some already, and where they can easily be enabled, disabled, and modified. This is also where new routines are created, with a tap on the + icon in the top-right corner. Here you’ll see the basic structure of any Alexa routine, and how they are made up of two parts – the ‘when’ and the ‘will’.

Tap ‘add an event’ in the ‘when’ section, then tap on ‘Sound Detection’. Here you’ll see all six sounds Alexa can respond to. As of writing, these are the sounds of a baby crying, water, coughing, beeping appliances, snoring, and barking dogs. All pretty self-explanatory.

The routine I’ll build here will see Alexa turn a hallway light on when baby crying is heard, thus helping you find your way from your room to the baby’s in the middle of the night. I have already named a smart light ‘hallway’ to make this as logical as possible. Tap on Baby Crying, then pick which of your Amazon Echo devices you want to detect the sound. Sonos speakers aren’t compatible, so only Amazon’s own Echo products show up in this list. Pick the device then tap next.

3. Set a schedule

On the next screen, you can configure how the routine works by setting a daily or weekly schedule. For this example, I’ve set the routine to function every night between 8 PM and 7 AM. The app isn’t granular enough to adjust the need for lighting based on the time of year, but I can forgive it for that. There’s also an option to stop the routine from repeating within a certain time frame, which can be set between one minute and 12 hours.

The system also lets you decide whether Alexa acts on the sound immediately, or only if the sound is detected for a certain amount of time. In this instance, you can tell Alexa to only turn the light on if a baby's crying is heard for at least 30 seconds. For other routines, you might want to increase this, with up to 60 minutes possible. Tap next.

4. Tell Alexa what to do

Now we can tell Alexa what to do when the sound is heard under the given conditions. Tap save, followed by the ‘add an action’ button in the ‘Alexa will’ section of the routine recipe. Here you can have Alexa say something (through an Echo speaker at your bedside, for example, play music, control a smart home device, or perform a custom action; these are created by typing in what you would say to Alexa to make it perform that action.

In this case, I want Alexa to turn a smart light on in the upstairs hallway. To do this, tap Smart Home, then Lights, and pick the light you want to control. Be aware that you can only choose one smart light, or a single group of lights (perhaps you have two lamps assigned to a group called hallway in your smart lighting system).

On the next screen, you can decide whether the routine turns the light on or off, along with the brightness (either to a set number or an increase or decrease of 25 percent), and the color. Five versions of white are available, from cool to warm, plus 15 colors. This is Alexa’s own selection, however, so you can’t pick a lighting scene created in an app like Philips Hue. Tap save, then next.

5. Add multiple actions

You can now add another action to the same routine – perhaps you want Alexa on the Echo in your bedroom to tell you the baby is crying, and for an Echo in the baby’s room to start playing a piece of calming music. You could also have Alexa add the crying to your calendar if you’d like to keep a record of when your baby is waking in the night, for example. 

If your dog also benefits from calming music, at least some kind of audio distraction to stop them barking, you could create a sound-based routine to do that too. Similarly, an Alexa routine could be used to play a sound when it detects snoring.