Amazon’s virtual assistant is a modern-day toolkit for the home, a science fiction gadget which still feels innovative.

Smarter Partners 

 
Alexa has become a bridge between different appliances, making robot vacuums, electronic fireplaces, wireless mowers and more than 100,000 other devices user friendly in brand new ways.

Smart TVs, smart thermostats, smart lightbulbs and even Wi-Fi enabled locks are all part of Alexa’s community of connection. As those connections increase, the number of devices specifically designed for effortless relationships with the virtual assistant also continue to rise.

Innovative products have been breaking new ground and taking Alexa along with them. The super convenient Boompod Bluetooth speaker is now the smallest speaker in the world offering inbuilt Alexa. Since Amazon purchased the Smart doorbell giant Ring, every step of their design process has virtual assistant technology in mind. Smart plugs are also reducing daily tasks to one-word solutions.

In addition to this, Amazon has set up the Certified for Humans project, which makes sure that the technical details are resolved by experts before products are released, making using these powerful devices hassle free.
 

Visuals with Echo
 


 
 Visual displays became an option for the virtual assistant with the release of the original Amazon Echo Show, and the latest in the Echo line reached the market at the very end of 2021.

The Echo Show 15 blends in smoothly as an item of high-tech furniture, offering the full utility of Alexa supported with a 15.6” HD screen. One of the most popular uses has been as a digital picture frame, allowing the virtual assistant to cycle through galleries of high-definition photos and memories, directly from Amazon Photos. Another standout feature from the Echo Show 15 is the ability to recognise individual users with Amazon’s visual ID software, and then adapt the display to show personal content for that user like their unique calendar and notes.
 

Talent from the Community

 

By using the Alexa Skills store you can add to the device’s knowledge base, accessing a community driven catalogue of work that contains tens of thousands of new talents for your assistant to master.

You could spend all your time with Alexa checking the weather, playing podcasts, looking up recipes and requesting the occasional joke. If you make the mistake of focusing on the default features and basic skills though, you’ll miss out on a world of homegrown content.

On the skills store there’s content available from all kinds of contributors, offering a mixture of novelty and genius. Even better, this extra content is entirely free to add to your device, except for those Alexa skills which might need you to have access to a different paid service.

View all the unique skills created and made available by other users on Amazon and discover hidden gems including:

• ‘Alexa, what are your deals?’ to prompt Alexa to provide a list of exclusive deals for Amazon Prime users
• ‘Alexa, open the Magic Door’ for a fully developed interactive adventure game.
• ‘Alex, ask Big Sky’ to access super local, super detailed weather information
• 'Alexa, ask My Buddy’ to immediately send an alert to someone in your contact list, a thoughtful skill to keep vulnerable people connected

Remember, you can download these skills by opening the Amazon Alexa app, opening the Skills & Games option from the menu, then searching for a skill and hitting the 'Enable to Use' button.

 Alexa Answers





One of the fastest ways for Alexa get smarter is to learn from us! With Alexa Answers, community members can look through questions that the virtual assistant can’t tackle alone, and use their own expertise to provide an answer and help Alexa pass on the information. The system depends on good ratings and customer feedback, and rewards valued contributors with points, making it one of the most user driven ways to keep pushing past Alexa’s limits.