In just a few short years, the Amazon Echo has gone from a random speaker that nobody knew what to do with to a staple in the consumer tech space. Amazon's evolved the Echo and Alexa (the AI that powers it) over those years, and one of the most powerful additions so far is a feature called "Alexa Routines."
With Routines, you can configure your Echo to perform a variety of functions after saying one simple command. For example, instead of turning on your lights, playing the news, and catching up on the weather by talking to your Echo three different times, you can queue all these to go off one after another with just one keyword.
How to set up Routines in the Alexa app
You can make Routines as simple or complex as you'd like, and to help you get started, we've got a few tips to make the process as easy as can be. First, let's make a Routine that's activated by a voice command,
- Launch the Alexa app on your phone or tablet.
- Open the left-side menu and tap Routines.
- Tap the + icon near the top right.
- Select When this happens, choose voice, type in your desired phrase, and hit Save.
- Tap on Add action and select the actions you want.
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Tap Create once you've added all your desired actions.
This is where things get exciting. Right now, you can program Alexa to greet you, say a funny fact, play music, catch you up on the news, control your smart home gadgets, brief you on the traffic, change your Echo's volume, and tell you about the weather. You can add as many of these as you'd like, and once you've got a few in place, you can reorder the position in which Alexa will act on them by holding down on the six dots next to each command and moving them up or down.
In addition to triggering Routines with a special command, you can also have them go off at a certain time of day. To do this —
- From the Alexa app, open the left-side menu and tap Routines.
- Tap the + button near the top right.
- Select When this happens and choose Schedule.
- Tap At Time to schedule the time of day the Routine is triggered and Repeat if you want it to repeat on certain days.
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Tap the actions you want.
You can view your Routines at any time from the Routines page in the Alexa app, and tapping on an existing one will give you controls for temporarily disabling or deleting it altogether.
That's all folks!
Need additional help setting up Routines? What are some of the ones you've already made? For any additional questions/comments, sound off in those comments below!
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