Voice In Canada Flash Briefing #250

So as I mentioned earlier in the week, Amazon continues to update the Alexa app on the smartphone, and they released quite a major update recently; and, if you haven’t yet downloaded it, then, go check it out. Download your updated Alexa app, whether you’ve got an iPhone, or you’re on Android, or so on. And there are a number of different features on this new interface, but today, I just wanted to briefly touch about the smart home part of it.

Along the bottom, when you download, you’ll see there’s basically 5 icons. There’s sort of a “home screen” icon, there’s a “communication” icon, there’s the actual “Alexa logo” (which is how you can talk to Lexi on your phone). There is the “music and books” icon, and then the last one, the fifth one is “devices or smart home” And, I think they’ve done an excellent job of cleaning this up because now it’s a lot easier to use.

Along the top, we’ve got small icons that break it down into different types of devices. So there’s your actual Echo and Alexa devices, the actual hardware. So the echo devices, that’s where you go to change things on the settings for your individual echo devices. Then there’s a grouping for lights, plugs, switches, locks, scenes; all devices. So that makes it really easy.

If you have smart devices, take a look at how they look on the Alexa app. I like the look of it. I like the look of the new interface.

And then another nice thing is, you’ve got your groups that you’ve set up in nice big cards essentially, almost they look almost like flashcards, and, you can scroll through those, they’re color-coded based on your group; and you can see if the light is on or off on the group. And so this is a very easy, very nice, clean visual interface, to see which of your things are on or off. So I think they’ve done a nice job of, of cleaning this up.

This continues to improve and there are lots of iterations going on and it’s nice to see that we are getting some of these changes in Canada. So there you go. Particularly if you have smart devices, take a look at how they look on the Alexa app. I like the look of it. I like the look of the new interface. So there you go. Let me know what you think. Alright. Talk to you tomorrow.

Resources Mentioned in this Episode

Listen on your Echo Device! Easy as 1-2-3!

Voice in Canada Skill Logo1. Open your Alexa app and click on the Menu button > Settings > Flash Briefing.
2. Click on “Add Content” and search for “Voice in Canada”.
3. Click on “Voice in Canada” and the Enable button.

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