The Ultimate Guide To Amazon Alexa

Make the most of Amazon’s powerful voice assistant with our guide to setting up, controlling and customising your Alexa devices. David Ludlow talks you through all the essentials.

- David Ludlow

From nothing to being in thousands of homes just a few years later, Amazon Alexa has kickstarted a new range of devices that you can control with just the power of your voice. While it’s easy enough to get started with an Echo smart speaker, fine-tuning it to work the way you want – from delivering the information you need and playing the music from the service you want to making your smart homework better – isn’t quite as easy.

In this guide, we’ll take you through everything you need to know about Amazon Alexa, and show you how to improve and tweak it. We’ll also address the privacy concerns that many people have.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ALEXA

Once you’ve got your Echo hooked up to your Amazon account, you can do a lot straight away. Here’s everything you need to know about Alexa

There are plenty of Amazon Alexadevices out there, but the core services are all run in the cloud. As such, the hardware defines the sound quality (or picture quality, in some cases), but the main features are the same across all devices, with a few exceptions for third-party smart speakers (see box, opposite). For that reason, our group test of Echo devices on page 88will help you buy the right hardware, but here, we’ll show you what Alexa is capable of.

A good starting point is with the features that are built into Alexa. These are the commands and options you can start with.

ANSWER ME

At its most basic, Alexa is there to answer any questions you might have.Want to know how to spell a word? Ask Alexa.Want to know the answer to a maths problem? Ask Alexa. Likewise, you can find out which day Christmas or your birthday will fall on. You can ask about IMDB ratings for TV shows and find out who plays certain characters.