Having Amazon’s Alexa remind you to do something is great but, unlike Alarms that have to be dismissed, reminders can be easily missed if you happen to be out of the room when the reminder goes off and you don’t see the notification on your phone. If there’s a reminder that you absolutely don’t want to miss, you can now have Alexa follow up on a reminder to ensure you got the message or didn’t forget about it. Read more ›
Matter, the new smart home standard that is supposed to usher in a new era of simplicity and interoperability across all forms of smart home devices has officially launched this week. It’ll probably be months before support for Matter reaches all the different device types included in the standard, such as Fire TVs and streaming devices, but Amazon has announced the first 17 Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Show models to receive support for Matter. Here’s the full list as well as details on which aspects of Matter will initially be functional and which will not. Read more ›
A little-known feature of Fire TV devices is the ability to say “What should I watch?” to Alexa to launch a conversational AI-driven recommendation interface that can help you whittle down the abundance of available streaming content. The feature first launched a year ago with the introduction of Amazon’s own Omni Series Fire TVs and now it is out of beta and available to everyone. Read more ›
When you ask Alexa for the weather, the voice assistant’s standard response is to give you the sunniness, current temperature, high temperature, and low temperature. If that’s too much info and you just want to know the day’s high or low temperature, it’s now possible to get just that, as discovered by Reddit user derallo. If you ask “Alexa, what’s the high/low today?,” you’ll now just be told, “Today, expect a high/low of [##] degrees fahrenheit/celsius.” If you want just the current temperature and ask “Alexa, what is the temperature?” you still also get told the day’s high, unfortunately. If all you want is the current temperature, you can use the Alexa Skill Just The Temperature, which lets you say “Alexa, just the temperature” and get back “It’s [##] degrees” as a response. Update: As noted in the comments, it seems like this change isn’t available to everyone yet.
Amazon has recently made it possible to make an Alexa request that doesn’t actually execute immediately. As discovered by Reddit user versaveaux, you can now add “…in X minutes” to the end of an Alexa request to easily schedule the request in the near future. For example, saying “turn off the lights in 10 minutes” will now work as expected. Judging by the comments from some people on Reddit, this new capability may not be available to everyone yet.
Amazon has announced an upcoming Alexa capability called “Customers Ask Alexa” which will allow brands to submit their own answers to questions asked by Alexa users. Instead of providing an answer sourced from the web or crowdsourced from other Alexa users, as is done today, Alexa may soon choose to use a branded answer instead. Read more ›
The first regular season Thursday Night Football game between the San Diego Chargers and the Kansas City Chiefs kicks off tomorrow at 4pm PT and Amazon has added some new Alexa commands to make the experience a bit better on Fire TV devices. Of course, you can say “Alexa, play Thursday Night Football” to jump into the game but you can now also say “Alexa, open X-Ray” to see real-time access live stats appear on the right of the screen. If you don’t want to be distracted with on-screen stats, you can just ask Alexa for specific stats, like “Alexa, how many rushing yards do the Chiefs have today?“, “Alexa, who has the most tackles today?“, or “Alexa, who leads the NFL in touchdowns?“, and Alexa will reply with the answer without interrupting the game. As a reminder, Thursday Night Football is the first Prime Video content that can be recorded for viewing later. You can set games to record in the Prime Video app on Fire TV devices, or you can achieve the same thing by simply saying “Alexa, add Thursday Night Football to my watchlist.” Adding Amazon’s NFL coverage to your watchlist will make all game playback available “until 2023,” according to Amazon.
Amazon has just announced Alexa Game Control at the Gamescom gaming convention, which allows PC and Xbox gamers to perform various in-game actions by voice. To use it, you won’t need to say “Alexa…” or even have an Alexa device, like an Echo, because it works by just directly speaking into any gaming mic or headset. Read more ›
Amazon’s biggest problem with Alexa, since the very beginning, has been discoverability. When you have a device that primarily has no interface, it becomes extremely difficult to inform its users of all the new features the device has been receiving. Amazon’s solution has been to have Alexa make usage suggestions after it finishes responding to you by saying “by the way…” followed by a suggestion. These suggestions walk a very fine line between being useful and annoying, with many people considering them the latter. Amazon has now made it possible to stop “by the way” suggestions but there’s a catch. Read more ›
Amazon has a new set of Alexa-exclusive Prime Day Deals. These prices can only be had if you either place your order through Alexa or, at least, ask Alexa to add the items to your cart. Once in your cart using Alexa, you can then checkout on Amazon’s website as usual and still receive the Alexa-exclusive discounted prices. The best deal of the bunch is the Kasa Smart Plug Mini for $3.49, which is 85% off the regular price of $22.99. That matches the lowest price it has ever been because this same Alexa-exclusive deal was available during Prime Day 2021. Read on for the full list of Alexa-exclusive deals and how they stack up to past deals. Read more ›
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