Talk to me about Alexa!

[purplepoop]

Kids are going on about her.

Looked in Argos , selling for £60. Thinking if Christmas, but do i pay any extras?

If I switch her on does she do things immediately!?

Im clueless!

You need Amazon Prime - £7.99 a month.

It needs to connect to your WiFi. And you need the Alexa app on your phone to set it up.

I have an echo dot in the lounge,one in my bedroom and my son has one in his room.

Do they have Kindles? If so they can get a taste of it through that without spending anything.

I love ours! We ended up with 4 and now have Phillips hue lights and nest thermostat. I can do so much just sitting on the couch it’s great!

They always go on offer in the run up to Christmas

Mine has an Alexa in their room (kids settings)
Alexa will tell jokes, read stories, make cat/fart/dog noises, play from a Spotify playlist, set timers.... endless!
They love it, I love mine - no tin hat here, nothing to hide 😁

I meant a dot in their room!

So, say i buy one each, i pay £7.99 for Prine to cover 3?

What does Prine give me? Is it necessary? Just read on internet that there us no monthly fee🤔

We have spotify so we could use it to play music via Bluetooth

My kids like listening to books on my audible subscription, you pay for the books though or the subscription is £7.99.

Prime🙈

You don't need Prime at all.

I love ours we have the echo in the kitchen and dots in the bedroom. Go asleep every night listening to rain sounds. Great for setting alarms and reminders too

I'm not that techy though and I know we aren't using it to it's full potential. My teenage son uses it for a lot more than I do and can send me messages through it while he's not in the house which is a bit unsettling sometimes!

FrankiesKnuckle no tinhat here either, but "I have nothing to hide" ?

Oh right, no need for prime then. Just as a speaker really, bit of fun!

So you can tell her to make it sound as if it’s raining!?

Im not techy at all!

The subscription is for playing music. You can ask it to play anything from amazon music. I think it also has audio books as well but I’ve never used those. I got mine for about £27ish in the Black Friday deals last November, so it’s probably worth waiting until then. Mine came with a month’s free trial of amazon music. It also works with Spotify premium if you have that (and you can sometimes get 3 months of that for 99p so it might be a while before you have to pay).

I think you can play radio stations without a subscription, but if you want your kids to be able to say “Alexa play baby shark” a bajillion times a day you’ll need to subscribe.

My kids also like asking it the weather, asking it to tell jokes, reminders, simple questions and sums, and setting a timer when they clean their teeth.

I've just asked her to play raining sounds, she said she couldn't but she could give me a sleeping track with raining sounds on it.

You will want Amazon Music, I think it's £4.99 a month, and you can get pretty much any song you want on there, with the music library ever expanding. (Exhibit A: I have been asking it to play a particular song for months and months, and I've just asked it now, and it finally understood what song I wanted!)

You will inevitably end up screaming at it once in a while when it refuses to hear, listen or understand you - I nearly swore at mine the other day. But isn't that a problem with all technology?

Thanks, my kids are well over the baby shark song😂
I’ll hold off till November and see what is available. And stick to Spotify (DD pays for that herself).

She might not understand us. Very strong accent!

Purple poop

You just say 'Alexa play rain' and she plays an hour of rain sounds, if you want it to play all night you just tell her to loop it. There's thunder and lightening too. I'm a terrible sleeper but honestly this has me asleep in 30 mins! Love it. There's loads of other 'sleep sounds' but rain works best for me.

You can also tell her to play genres of music like 80's pop or charts. I bought my 65 year old mum one, she said it was a fad. She loves it now listens to radio stations that aren't from the country she's living in. She gardens a lot so also uses it for audio books.

My only complaint is that it's mains powered so no option to recharge or use batteries!

If you already have a Spotify acct you won't need prime, we use spotify as default music player on ours. It's brilliant.

Do NOT ask it 'what's 100 in Welsh '

Hey ive seen the Boris Johnson carrot 100 thing😂😂😂😂😂

We are actually Welsh😂🙈

You can make playlists and give them names too, then if you want to hear a particular one say "Alexa, play/shuffle my X playlist" or if you want to hear all of them mixed up, say "Alexa, shuffle my music". Although you may end up with Christmas songs in the middle of August in my case.

You can set alarms and change the sounds (like on a phone), they don't have to be one-off alarms - you can have it for X time every weekday, Y time every Saturday etc (which I have just done on mine as I write!).

You can also ask her to sing... in a horrible AI voice... and you can occasionally have a conversation with her! My favourite song of hers is plain old Jingle Bells because the voice is so expressionless!

Looks like I'm wrong in thinking you HAVE to pay to use Alexa. I have Prime and (wrongly) assumed you had to pay - it's just you get more from "her" if you have Prime.

I love listening to rain sounds at night,or campfires/forest/beach sounds. Also I can get it to read one of my kindle books too. Plus music.