Just call it 'Alexa'
For Smart Home Users – How Can the Assistant Help You Today?
For Smart Home Users – How Can the Assistant Help You Today?
Let us introduce you to Alexa. Now is a good time to get to know or learn more about Amazon’s cloud-based voice service. Alexa is available around the world, and multiple third-party device manufacturers earn millions being affiliated with it. Utilized by homes and businesses to interact with technology, it can manage entertainment systems and cameras installed in their space. Simply put, it is functioning just as Amazon designed it to be, a service that “can build natural voice experiences that offer customers a more intuitive way to interact with the technology they use every day.”
Alexa was named after the ancient library of Alexandria, according to Grant Clauser of thewirecutter.com, who expounds on its many capabilities in his article “What Is Alexa? What Is the Amazon Echo, and Should You Get One?” Through an Echo smart speaker, Amazon equips an Alexa user with endless capabilities, such as playing music tracks, dimming lights, searching the web, and shopping online, among others. Clauser opines that Alexa’s responsiveness sets it apart from other first-generation voice assistants. All anyone has to do is say a trigger word, the command or what he or she would like to happen, and it’s done – granted that everything is set up properly, of course. “Once you get used to the quirks,” he writes, “using Alexa feels much more natural and responsive than speaking to a phone-based voice assistant like Apple’s Siri. As a result, you’ll likely find yourself using your phone less frequently when you’re at home.”
So, just what can having the service in our homes do? Here’s a few that makes us want to get to knowAlexa more:
01 Skills at work.
Clauser explains that in the Alexa world, a skill can be likened to an app or a program that can enable a new ability for a user. There are over 25,000 skills, and new skills are launched weekly. To help users manage all these, Amazon released the Alexa Skill Kit (ASK). The company’s website describes it as a collection of self-service tools, documentations, and code samples to make adding Alexa skills easier and faster. Skills are available for the home, vehicles, trivia and games, health and fitness, lifestyle, and even for the workplace. Several brands also have skills, including Starbucks, Spotify, and Uber. And there are dedicated ASK sites for countries like Japan, Germany, India, and the United States, among others.
02 Voice power.
Alexa will be more than willing to tell you about the weather or help you purchase a song on Amazon Music. Yes, these are things you can probably already do on your smart phone. But Clauser says the difference is doing it handsfree. He says Alexa was created “for smart-home users who think even launching an app is too tedious.” Is he talking about you? But just like in the real world where you have to be polite and ask nicely, users have to learn to ask properly by learning commands right.
03 Alexa can find your phone.
Rachel Murphy of www.thisisinsider.com says the Alexa Find My Phone feature will help you locate your mobile device in no time. In the article “7 of the most highlyrated features for the Amazon Alexa that you need to try,” the author explains that when you tell the service to find your phone, it will call it anytime you ask the service to do so. She also shares a tip: “by adding Alexa’s number to your contacts and enabling bypass when you save it, a phone call will push through even when it is set on silent or “do not disturb” mode.
04 It makes your brain work.
The skill Question of the Day will challenge your knowledge about current events, politics, science, and more! Enable this skill and say a magic phrase like “Alexa, ask the question of the day!” You can also check your music aptitude and how well you know the words to some songs. Better be prepared though because Murphy says the song choices are not only limited to the latest hits but also come from past decades as well! And for the young ones, you can enhance their spelling capabilities and teach them the meaning of big words at the same time!
05 Everything else.
We feel like Dr. Seuss when he wrote “Oh the Things You Can Do that are Good for You!”Alexa has skills to help you exercise or find a recipe and assist you as you cook it. On your Amazon Echo, a smart speaker, you can also get the skills to tell bedtime stories, tune into a sports channel or news agency, and even ask it to be with you when you meditate or play sleep-inducing sounds.