

You can browse the various categories or search for something you might want. To solve for X, head to the Alexa app on your mobile device, tap the Menu button, and then tap Skills. Given everything Alexa can do right out of the box, it's easy to overlook all the capabilities you can add - capabilities that come in the form of "skills." (Think apps, but for Alexa.) There are thousands of them, and you can add any one just by saying, "Alexa, enable the X skill."
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To play music from either of those sources, you can do one of two things: Use your computer to upload your collection to Amazon Music or else pair your mobile device to your Echo/Echo Dot/Tap and stream the music via Bluetooth ( see instructions). Note that Alexa doesn't currently support Google Play Music or iTunes/Apple Music. All you have to do is say, "Alexa, play the Holiday Classics playlist on Amazon Music." Of course, even if it's not the default, you can play from any of those services just by tacking its name on to your request. You can make Amazon Music, Spotify, iHeartRadio or Pandora your default music service. Under Default music library, tap the pull-down and choose Spotify or Amazon Music (or under Default station service, choose Amazon Music, iHeartRadio or Pandora).

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Now for the bad news: Although Alexa's text-to-speech reading is decent, for now it's no substitute for professional narration. In fact, it'll pick up wherever you left off, which is nice if you stopped reading at bedtime and want to resume while, say, whipping up dinner in the kitchen. If you spend a lot of time in your car or do a lot of walking, you don't have to neglect the latest literature - Alexa can read the text of any book in your Kindle library. But your only voice-powered option is to hear the latest one. You can get more granular by searching TuneIn via the Alexa app, then choosing the exact episode you want to hear.

Needless to say, that's not exactly ideal. What's more, if you want to listen to anything but the most recent episode, you have to tell Alexa to "play the previous episode" - and do so over and over until you get to the one you want. However, although you can pause and resume playback, you'll lose your place if you ask it to do anything else while that episode is paused. Thus, you can ask Alexa to "play The Nerdist podcast" or "listen to The Truth on TuneIn," and you're good to go. That's thanks to the Echo's direct integration with TuneIn, a service that's home not only to live radio stations, but also to a large library of podcasts. Listen to podcastsĪlexa is probably best known for its music acumen and can sling tunes from a variety of sources, but it can also serve up podcasts. Here are nine ways to get the most from your virtual, voice-powered assistant. Alexa, disembodied though it may be, can do a lot more than you might think - everything from finding your misplaced phone to helping you get a good night's sleep. But as the Echo family of products has grown, so has the ecosystem that surrounds it. If you own one of these gadgets, you probably know the basics by now - you can ask Alexa for today's weather forecast, a daily news briefing, an oven timer or a favorite playlist. (It recently made its way to select Amazon Fire tablets as well.) Alexa, of course, is the voice-activated "smart" assistant lurking inside the Amazon Echo, Amazon Echo Dot and Amazon Tap products.

Alexa has arrived, and it's way smarter than Siri. Siri had a good run, but its time in the spotlight is over.
