Smart home
accessories FAQs

Smart home devices let you control many of the things in your home remotely. Using your phone, tablet or just your voice, you can do everything from turning on the heat to locking the front door to shutting off the lights.

Smart speakers are controlled by your voice. They have built-in virtual assistants designed to answer your questions and respond to your commands. Some go way beyond just playing your favorite music. They work together with other smart devices to turn on lights, lock your door and even tell you the weather.

Whenever you connect to the internet, you need to be vigilant about security. With smart home devices, there are additional steps you should take to improve your security. You can change your passwords, keep your software up-to-date and minimize exposure to security issues. For more ideas on how to protect your smart home, visit our smart home security guide.

Cortana is no longer able to control smart home devices. Voice assistants that can control your smart home devices include such services as Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant.

It's not actually the smart home devices that slow your W-Fi down. It's how many connected devices you have going at the same time. The more devices you have connected, the slower your Wi-Fi may become.

Smart home devices connect to your home network and give you a simple way to control everyday technology like your thermostat or TV. Simply by using your voice or an app, you can do everything from adjusting the setting of your heat to turning off your television.

There are many different types of smart home devices, such as TVs, speakers, security systems and thermostats. As brands like Google, Amazon and Apple continue to innovate, the number of devices will continue to grow.

Apple has lots of products to make your home smarter like Apple TV and remotes and HomePods. Verizon makes it easy to shop for them.

Yes, many smart home security cameras have audio. Some offer two-way communication that lets you listen to and speak with someone through the camera. Other cameras offer triggered video recording. That means if someone or something (like an animal) is detected, audio is triggered to respond.

While many security cameras do use Wi-Fi, you'll find options that don't. Some cameras work without Wi-Fi, either through an LTE (4G LTE) wireless data plan or by simply using their own local storage (i.e., a hard drive).

The amount of footage home security cameras save varies based on how many cameras you have, which type of storage you opt for (such as an SD card, local storage or cloud) and the type of camera you choose. SD cards and local storage generally store less data than you can keep in the cloud.