Alexa can wake up more of your smart home devices

You can certainly use Amazon's Alexa to turn on some devices, but that support is frequently limited. What if a device is in a low-power state and won't respond to your hue and cry? Amazon now has a solution. It recently added a "wake-on-LAN" control method that can turn on sleeping connected gadgets in the home that otherwise won't respond to voice control. Device makers just need to craft Alexa skills that use the new control to have it turn on TVs and other hardware on the local network.

Hisense, LG and Vizio are already banking on the technology and plan to deploy it to their TVs over the "next several months," Amazon said. It's not clear who else is onboard, but this won't require hardware changes, according to the company. In short: don't be surprised if many devices let you wake them with a spoken command in the near future.