Does anyone here have an Alexa/Echo? How do you use it?

Not just "hell no", but... ummm... what comes after "hell no"?

mostly as a music player - "Alexa, play dinner cocktail music on Pandora" or "Alexa, what is the weather forcast for today? Also get severe weather alerts.


A niece has smart lights in her place so she can turn them on and off with voice control.

I turned off notifications for packages, because we would often get the Amazon delivery before the notification.

We've had alexa for a while now. It lives in our kitchen.

The main thing we use it for is to keep our shopping lists. We can just say "Alexa add bananas to the Shoprite list" or "Alexa add toilet paper to the Target list" and keep separate lists for every store. Then with the Alexa app on our phone, we can pull up the lists from the store and mark things off as we go.

I also use it to play jeopardy - the Jeopardy app uses the 6th (backup) question for each category from Jeopardy the day before - it uses Alex Trebek's voice and all.It tells you how many you got right and how you compare to the other players that day. Often, when I am doing scut kitchen work like chopping veggies or washing dishes I will play jeopardy to pass the time. There's a ton of other trivia type games too, if you finish that day's jeopardy questions.

Also, we subscribe to amazon music and can use it to play pretty much any song we want (Alexa, play Castle of Glass by linkin park) or just ask it to put on background music (Alexa, play top 40 hits). Also, I just found out that you can hook it to your Sirius satellite radio account - I got a good deal on Sirius for one of our cars and now I can also listen to it in the house via the Alexa.

There's also electric outlets you can buy that Alexa recognizes - you can give each one a name and tell her to turn it on or off. For a while, Mr. Lisa was using to them to turn our lights on and off but I felt that was too lazy -easier for me to just walk to the lamp to turn it on. However, it did come in handy for the christmas tree lights because the plug was buried behind the tree. No more climbing back there to plug things in - just say "Alexa turn Christmas Tree on"

I did tune for a new client about 7 months ago that had a newer "smart" home. WiFi was down, so I had to tune in the dark, they couldn't figure out how to make the lights work!

Another client had the piano room lighting set dim and had to call her husband at work to turn up the lights...

I don't have Alexa, but this is still hilarious!
(warning: adult language...)



Regular link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcjsE-qJDfw

Shopping lists
Timers, mostly kitchen.
It will applaud when asked. Use this for the cook, etc.
Music
Weather
Time
Get an email every friday with new things it can do. Sometimes I read them

Amazon Prime is as much Bezos as I'm comfortable with. It's still probably too much....

quote:

Originally posted by rontuner:
I did tune for a new client about 7 months ago that had a newer "smart" home. WiFi was down, so I had to tune in the dark, they couldn't figure out how to make the lights work!

Another client had the piano room lighting set dim and had to call her husband at work to turn up the lights...

quote:

Originally posted by wtg:

quote:

Originally posted by rontuner:
I did tune for a new client about 7 months ago that had a newer "smart" home. WiFi was down, so I had to tune in the dark, they couldn't figure out how to make the lights work!

Another client had the piano room lighting set dim and had to call her husband at work to turn up the lights...

Ron OMG

SK ... oh, that was a scream!

quote:

SK ... oh, that was a scream!

I use it in my linguistics class when we start the unit on speech recognition technology and machine translation.

I am in the 'hell no' camp.

quote:

Originally posted by CHAS:
Shopping lists
Timers, mostly kitchen.
It will applaud when asked. Use this for the cook, etc.
Music
Weather
Time
Get an email every friday with new things it can do. Sometimes I read them

I gave one to older cousin when they first came out. He uses it all the time.

Cooking as a timer, turn on the stereo in the other room, big house...

Ask it history questions when something comes on tv...death year, etc

Very convenient. Probably the best gift I ever got him!

Me, I don't think I need or would use it.

They grow on you.
I hardly used it at first.
Now I may buy an Echo Link to play music from Amazon Music through my stereo receiver.
The drawback would be Don using it to play his music. NO