Voice in a Can

Alexa comes to the Apple Watch – kinda

$1.99 From Atadore, voiceinacan.com Made For Universal Needs iOS 11.1 or later Although Amazon has blessed iOS with an Alexa app for both iPhone and iPad, there’s no indication that they plan to do the same for watchOS – and if your smart home relies on Alexa-compatible hardware, that’s likely to be a pretty frustrating limitation.

Voice in a Can aims to bring Alexa to Apple Watch for a mere two bucks (a Mac version is also being worked on by the developer), but we didn’t find the Watch version all that useful. That’s because it can only tap into an extremely limited skill set, which almost entirely consists of smart home gear we don’t own. Sadly, you can’t place calls from your wrist, or play or control music either, and you certainly can’t hear the kind of announcements that Amazon Echo hardware owners are accustomed to.

There’s also the issue of response time, and Voice in a Can isn’t particularly speedy in that regard. Watch owners have become accustomed to this dilemma, but since Voice in a Can relies so heavily on a Wi-Fi or LTE signal for information, it feels particularly painful here.

Adding to this misery is the fact that the app disconnects from Alexa every time your Watch’s display turns off, so you’ll either have to increase the timeout setting to get around it, or get used to being patient while waiting for the app to reconnect every time. As a third-party app, Voice in a Can is probably as good as it’s going to get, and let’s face it: This is the only alternative available to Alexa fans at the moment. Just get used to seeing “there was a problem with this request” a whole lot…

the bottom line. Unless you own Alexa-enabled smart home devices, save your two bucks and stick to the official iPhone app for now.