Apple TV is a handy device for having pictures of animals you've never seen and places you've never been to scroll past you on your TV set, and also watching TV and movies.
But it's also a neat way of controlling your smart home gear using Apple's home kit protocols from outside of your own home.
Here in the CNET smart home, we'll show you how.
What Apple Home kit really does is to taxonomize the smart home and give devices a common vocabulary so everything can speak to each other and speak to Siri.
Of course if you're going to get started with home kit, you're going to need a home kit compatible gadget like this Selig sense bluetooth dead bolt.
Now, There's a growing list of items that work with HomeKit and you can find them on Apple's website.
But the easy way to check if a product is compatible with HomeKit is to look for this little label on the packaging.
That label tells you that the product is engineered to work specifically with Apple's HomeKit standards and with other products that are engineered in the same way.
It's kinda the whole gist of HomeKit.
Everything just works together under Apple Now installing some home kit devices is as simple as switching out a light bulb or plugging in a smart switch.
This deadbolt took a little bit more of a hands on installation obviously.
But once we got it in there, we synced it up with our home kit setup by entering this code in In to the product app.
And we actually didn't even have to enter it.
Home kit has a cool feature that uses your phone's camera to just look at that code and put it in automatically.
Kind of neat.
Once the device is paired up, you'll give it a specific Siri name so that she can recognize it once you ask her to unlock the backdoor.
THat's all well and good if you are controlling this lock at home.
If With the bluetooth device and if you're in bluetooth range your phone could talk to it.
But what if you go to work and you forget to lock your door and you want to ask Suri to take care of that?
How is she gonna talk to that lock from outside of the bluetooth range?
All you have to do is go into your settings and log into your Your iCloud account on Apple TV.
So for me, that's my personal email.
I log in.
I put my iTunes password in there, and voila, Apple TV is connected, and it's automatically synced up with my Home Kit gear.
If I try to turn off a light or lock a door from outside of the home, Apple TV will let that signal in and do the work for me.
Pretty simple as far as how-to's go, but it's a little confusing knowing exactly what Home Kit is and how it operates.
Hopefully this helps clear it up.
For C Net, here in the C Net smart home, I'm Ryan Chris.
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