Giving customers greater control with Energy Alerts

In an Australian-first for the energy sector, AGL is helping customers keep on top of their energy usage by enabling Energy Alerts through Amazon Alexa and the Google Assistant.

Recent Australian smart home research suggests more than 1.6m customers have started their smart home journey by purchasing a smart speaker – and this strong growth will continue with numbers set to reach 2.5m by the end of 2019*.

According to Telsyte, the number of connected devices in the home is expected to increase from 17 today to 37 by 2023, driven by the need to make homes more energy efficient.

Amazon Echo running Alexa (left), and Google Home Mini running Google Assistant (right)

How it works

Energy Alerts allows customers to set an energy budget and take control of their usage.

Customers who have linked their AGL accounts to the AGL Skill for Amazon Alexa or the AGL Action for the Google Assistant and enabled notifications can simply say ‘Alexa, set an energy alert’ or ‘Hey Google, set an energy alert’ and receive a notification from their voice assistant via their smart speaker – or smart phone, in the case of Google – when they have reached 50% and 100% of their nominated spend.

"This new feature adds to the ways AGL customers can use Amazon Alexa and the Google Assistant to manage their energy spending."

This includes being able to find out their account balance or bill due date, switch to e-billing or monthly billing, request a payment extension and get personalised usage insights and energy saving tips, all with a simple voice command.

To find out more about our AGL’s voice capability go to www.agl.com.au/smarthome.

*Telsyte Australian ioT@Home Market Study 2019