When talking about Amazon Alexa hacks, it’s a tale of great capabilities, the unsung story of Alexa’s integration and support for third-party software. It’s a well-known fact that the online retailer’s personal assistant counts in thousands of supported skills. Virtually every layer of conceivable usefulness is represented. From business and finance to entertainment and lifestyle to productivity and communication, Alexa does it all. There are loads of awesome things Alexa can do really well out of the box. The impressive list of featured devices starts with the Amazon’s flagship Echo smart speaker, who carries the bulk of associated Alexa features that made it a star in the first place. However, the power of Amazon’s virtual agent reflects in devices of all shapes and sizes. Amazon Fire Stick Alexa skills, for instance, include launching and controlling content for the 3.4″ x 1.2″ gadget.
With so much Alexa can do, it’s easy to lose track of some its capabilities. In particular, it’s easy to miss out the new and expanding skills, courtesy of Amazon’s open-source approach to its voice-powered agent. Thus, we’ll try to help out and present Amazon Alexa hacks you simply need to know.
Teach Alexa to understand you better
At the moment, interaction and communication with Alexa are only available in two languages: English and German. That means differences in accents and pronunciations are prone to some really bad and hopefully, hilarious communication (so you at least get a good laugh out of it). In reality, that’s wasting time and testing your nerves, if you lack patience for these sorts of things. However, the essence of digital assistants is constantly learning and improving. In this case, you can train Alexa to understand you better and avoid miscommunications.
You can do this by opening the Alexa app and going into Settings, naturally. From there, select the Voice Training option. As the name says, you will be provided with a set of 25 sample sentences or commands to read aloud. If that sounds like it will take a will, don’t’ worry – you can pause the training at any time. Alexa will record each of those in order to learn your unique linguistic traits. In addition, you can further improve Alexa’s understanding of you by tweaking History a bit. Namely, click any previous voice command that didn’t work as intended. You’ll get a pop-up question “Did Alexa do what you wanted?” on which you can tap “No” in order to improve voice recognition. That’s machine learning for you.
Alexa Skills
By opening up the Alexa API to global developers, Amazon made Alexa into an all-around capable agent. The result is Alexa’s ability to undertake numerous new and interesting tasks. Commonly known as Alexa skills, this collection of, well, skills, is what truly makes the voice agent a bonafide platform, not just a fancy piece of software. With the total well past the 10,000 mark, there is practically a skill for anything. Apart from the popular ones like Jeopardy!, Sleep and Relaxation Sounds and others, there are a few hidden gems. Naturally, we’ve sought out to find them.
We like what Automatic does. It’s a connected car adapter that plugs into the OBD-II port (on-board diagnostics), pairs with your smartphone via Bluetooth and syncs your car with Alexa. Thanks to it, you can keep tabs on your four-wheeled pet and get a complete status. This includes the location of it, current fuel level and its usage, how much you’ve driven in a certain period, potential maintenance issues, and so on. Just remember to word your questions correctly by adding “ask Automatic” in the command. For instance, to check where you parked your car, you need to say: “Alexa, ask Automatic where is my car?”
With an insanely broad scope of available skills, it takes time to sift through them. Naturally, not every skill is as useful as the previous one. There are more than enough stinkers to waste your time on them. Plus, discovering new skill is a time-consuming process so why not use a skill to find skills? While that may sound kinda redundant, it’s exactly what Skill Finder does. It’s Amazon’s very own offering you can launch by saying “Alexa, open Skill Finder” and then seamlessly browse through the available selection. Check out the skill of the day, top and newest skills in each category or just get more information about a particular skill. A skill for finding skills – nice one, Amazon.
Alexa Smart Appliances
Home automation is Alexa’s specialty. With numerous different skills, the assistant is more helpful around your habitat. And if you think it can get any better, you’re wrong. Apart from Amazon’s own list of expandable features, lots more can be added through IFTTT. In a nutshell, IFTTT ( an acronym for “if this then that”) is a website that people use to create applets. These applets connect various gadgets and software together, further complementing the device and the assistant you are using. There is an entire section dedicated to Alexa with some pretty specific stuff. For instance, one of the more popular applets is “Tell Alexa to email you your shopping list”, just to get an idea of what you can find.
IFTTT is free service and as such, is tied to others in order for it to work. In our example above, sending yourself your shopping list is only valid for Gmail users. Thus, you can deeply integrate Alexa into various layers of digital environment but keep in mind that effectiveness may vary. And if you worry if Amazon frowns upon this, don’t. The online retailer is a good sport about IFTTT, even dedicating a bit of space in Alexa’s FAQ.
Ease your daily commute
Commutes can be aggravating, a fact anyone with a job can verify. Well, not anyone as freelancers and work-from-home people do have this problem but the rest of the bunch gets its fair share of irritating travel on a daily basis. However, there’s a really neat hack that can make your daily commute a bit easier, at least. Under the Settings in the Alexa App, tap “Traffic”. You’ll see your home address already entered so add a new one (your workplace, in this case). The “Alexa, traffic update” command will provide you with the latest information regarding the fastest route and the estimated duration of the trip. Once you input a route to map, it stays stored until you manually change it. Additionally, you can map out other routes and add stops and detours along the way.
Bonus tip: ask for human help with the Amazon Echo devices
We conclude our list of Amazon Alexa hacks with a bonus tip because we’re that nice. Since Alexa is still primarily accessed via one of the Echo devices, Amazon actually has a dedicated line of support. These are real humans at work, not a virtual assistant (huh!) or a bot that will answer any question about your Echo device. Visit http://echo.amazon.com/#help/call and log in with your Amazon account. Type in your number in the appropriate contact form and wait for a callback.
Better overall control
It’s always overwhelming when dealing with something with a grand scope that Alexa possesses. And with the digital assistant getting better each week, it can be tough to start. Thus, we gave you our five Amazon Alexa hacks for getting the most out of your Alexa-enabled device. Give them a shot as they might end up making a huge difference. They certainly did for us.