The Internet of Things is here, they cried. Great, but do I really have to pull out my smartphone to do everything? Pushing a button was so much easier. Can’t I just talk to my house now? Can I scream “red alert” and have my lights flash red? The Star Trek dream.

For decades we’ve been shown that voice is the future. From Star Trek’s computer to Iron Man’s Jarvis, science fiction has put voice control at the forefront of man-machine interaction. But until recently the best we could do was shout at a smartphone and hope for the best.

Now there’s a new breed of AI butler available: the in-home, always-listening speakers – of which, the Amazon Echo and Echo Dot are currently the pinnacle in the UK. So what is it really like to turn your house into the starship Enterprise and be able to make like Captain Jean Luc Picard and simply shout “Computer, lights!”? I installed five Echo Dots and one Echo speaker in my house to find out.

The first step to inviting my new sultry-voiced AI partner into my home was to decide where to put her receptacles and what I actually wanted her to do. What you don’t realise when you start an Echo up for the first time is that you’re genuinely giving life to your house.

It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it

Alexa sounds like a person, or a house pretending to be a person, and the more you use it the more you start to think about her being built into the walls. But she isn’t. So the first job was to start dotting the Dots about the place so she practically is. Rooms are easy, hallways not so much.

Wall-mounting was the only option. After a trip to the local DIY shop for the largest drill bit I could find, I had a hole in the wall, an Echo Dot stuck to it about chest height and the microUSB cable hooked up. A ring of lights lit up and she breathed her first words.

“Hello.” My house was alive.

Out of the box, Alexa has got the basics. Weather, news, timers, and facts are all covered. Asking for news gives you a Sky News flash briefing: that was the first thing that had to be changed – what would my editor think?

Adding skills to Alexa is easy. Fire up the Alexa app, wait a bit, tap a few buttons and Bob’s your uncle. In my mind it happens a bit like in the Matrix: plug in, stick in a disc, get the operator to hit a button and hey presto “I know kung fu!”

Skills added, it was time to weave Alexa’s tendrils into the various devices about my home. Lights are the obvious thing. With a bunch of Philips Hue bulbs and strip lights dotted about the home turning on the lights was a breeze. That was until you realise that the rest of your family doesn’t speak the same dork language as you.

Each device has to have a unique name, and one you can remember without looking at an app or list.

“Alexa, turn on the living room light”

“I’ve found multiple lights called living room, which one did you want”

“Err, that one”

That’s not going to work.

The problem is that what’s a logical name to you might not be to your significant other. Even the brains behind Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, struggled with that one. You might call it the living room, someone else the lounge, maybe even the “TV room”. When you ask for a room that doesn’t exist in Alexa’s log of groups you get, “I cannot find a device or group called lounge” and blood starts to boil.

To save mine and my family’s sanity I ended up creating as many different group names as I could think of. Lounge, living room, TV room and front room all contain the living room lights. Say any of them and Alexa knows what you mean. But there’s nothing quite as satisfying as creating a group called “bloody” for those odd occasions when you can’t figure out quite the right word combo. “Turn on the bloody lights!”

And then what about the different lights in each room?

Alexa struggles with numbers, so my colleague Alex Hern suggested using the Nato phonetic alphabet: alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, etc. Best to skip Echo, but the rest work. Bedroom light one, two and three became bedroom light alpha, bravo and charlie. It works, but admittedly it sounds like I’m in the middle of one of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six games:

“Alexa, turn on bedroom light charlie delta one-niner. Op bedtime is now in operation. I repeat, bedtime is a go.”

Of course, nothing beats the awkwardness of trying to whisper commands to your house. In the dead of night you need the landing light on to see where you’re going, so you use your inside voice to try and turn on the lights, forgetting that even if you do manage it, Alexa will confirm your action at whatever volume level was set last time you used it.

“Alexa, turn on the landing light”

“OK!” she screams, or better yet shouts the equivalent to “I CAN’T HEAR YOU” when your softest tones simply don’t cut it.

Do that a couple of times and you’ll end up getting snuffed out in the middle of the night as your family seeks revenge. A button is certainly the way forward here, and the Logitech Pop switches, which like Alexa can basically control everything, are the answer, although Philips has its own switches too.

Shields up, red alert!

Alexa can command the lights to control brightness, colour and set scenes, but you quickly realise that simplicity is the key. I still can’t for the life of me remember what I called that “I’m trying to relax in the evening, but also not kill my eyes as the night draws in” mode.

Perhaps my new intelligent home’s best trick came with the combination of IFTTT (If this then that), Alexa and some coloured Hue bulbs. If you’ve ever wanted to truly live the Star Trek dream, now you can.

“Alexa, trigger red alert.”

And the whole house is turned into what looks like a brothel, or a starship under attack. I haven’t hooked up a siren yet, so more brothel.

OK, so you’ve got the lights down pat, what else can you do with your voice? Logitech’s Harmony Hub can be plugged into Alexa to turn on your TV, change the channel and that kind of thing. It works too, in a similar manner to control of an Echo speaker, that is until you “ask Harmony to turn up the volume” and you inadvertently jump 15dB from a comfortable level to ear-splittingly loud.

Then there’s the heating. If you happen to have a Nest or similar smart thermostat you can set the heat via voice, if you can remember what it’s called (hint: it’s the place you put it rather than the thing if you’re using a Nest).

So this is Christmas

It gets better if you happen to have a SmartThings Hub lying around. Anything you attach to it, which is basically anything “smart”, can be hooked up to Alexa for a bit of voice action. When is a Christmas tree not just a Christmas tree? When it can be controlled with the power of voice thanks to a smartplug.

Add a Sonos system into the mix and with a bit of hacking with the Harmony hub and SmartThings you can even start Merry Christmas by Slade to really round off the Christmas cheer, and drive the neighbours potty.

For the most part Alexa is good enough to know when she’s not required, but occasionally you’re having a conversation about something entirely unrelated and she’ll start up. The ring of lights pulsates, either shutting off when she realises that it’s not all about her, or interrupting with a seemingly random action or quizzing you about precisely what it was you wanted.

“Shut up, Alexa!” and she gets the hint. You end up scolding her like you might an unruly child. And when you’re trying to talk about her, unless you’ve hit the mute button you end up going further. “She who should not be named” is what Alexa goes by in my house, but I’ve seen some spell her out like you would a sensitive subject around a child. In this case though, Alexa can’t spell, or at least can’t work out that you’re talking about her.

Inviting an AI assistant to run my home has been one of the most rewarding tech experiments I’ve done to date, unifying the cluttered landscape of disparate devices and bringing my home to life. But it’s also caused the most grief in my family, not because it doesn’t work, or because it’s not useful, but because when you set it up, you know how to use it. The rest of your family doesn’t want to know until it becomes useful for them, and it only becomes useful when they start experimenting with it, which they won’t if it doesn’t do what they expect the first time round.

Alexa is a massive leap forward, and is clearly the future of smart homes, just make sure you hook everything up in as many ways as you can, or you might find a couple of Echo Dots ripped from the wall and an axe through your smart speaker.

• How to use technology to sleep better
  
• Amazon Echo review: the best combined speaker and voice assistant in the UK
• Samsung SmartThings Hub review: an Internet of Things to rule them all?
  
• Amazon Echo Dot review: as good as the Echo for one-third of the price
• Nest Learning Thermostat third-gen: the simple, effective heating gadget
  
• Logitech Harmony Elite review: easy to use remote that takes charge of your home