10 Cool New Things You Can Do With Alexa

I was trying to come up with something to write about and I figured that you might want to know about 8 new things that I found out you can do with Alexa.

No, this is not the same old Alexa skills that you normally hear about. If you’re here today chances are that you already have an Alexa device and you’re tired of asking it what the weather is like and telling you silly jokes or bedtime stories or maybe your just looking for reasons to buy one.

Well, you’re in the right place and I’m going to go over 8 new uses we’ve found for Alexa that I don’t hear people talking about much. You will have to find all these skills on the Amazon website or within the Alexa app and enable the skill before they’ll work.

1. Alexa Can Help You Find Your Phone

The first skill is finding your phone with phone finder. You know those times when you misplace your phone and you gotta go on your iPad or whatever and click find my phone? Well, you can do that with Alexa without the 50 clicks until you get to that button you were looking for.

You just say “Echo use phone finder to find my phone”. Echo will then say “alarming your phone, if it is online it will soon begin to vibrate”. Personally, I find this super useful and a much better solution than using the “find my phone” feature from Apple.

2. Alexa Can Tune Your Guitar

The second skill that we’ve found is tuning your guitar with guitar tuner so if you have a guitar that is way out of tune you can tell your Alexa device to tune your guitar. You say “ask guitar tuner to tune my guitar” and Alexa responds “let’s tune” and then it will walk you through tuning your guitar.  You can also tell it to tune an individual string, you say “tell guitar tuner to tune A” and Alexa responds with “play note A” and then it will help you tune the A string.

3. Alexa Drop In

This whole section is really about communication and using your device to call, message, and use it for drop-ins. You can actually use it to call someone on their phone for free.

The two surprising features that come with the device without any installation are the announcement and drop in feature. So if you have multiple Amazon devices it’s very useful to make announcements.

An announcement is where you broadcast your message throughout the multiple Alexa devices that you have in your home. It’s really useful if you’re telling everyone that dinner’s ready, telling the family that it’s time to go to an event or just broadcast any message that you want to anyone in any room.

The other feature is that you can drop-in to any device that you want including your phone. Your phone acts really well as a security device especially you have the spot because you can see through the camera and you see what’s going on in any room when you’re not home.

4. Alarm Reminders

You can use Alexa to set your alarms to countdown and remind me to do things that I need to do. When setting an alarm you can actually set it to a song, for example, you can say “wake me up tomorrow with the cello song” and it will wake you up with that song. Another example is that you can tell Alexa “remind me to get the laundry in ten minutes” and it will remind you with an alarm.

5. Alexa is a Bluetooth Speaker Too

One thing that we use frequently in my house is that you can actually use your device to stream music, play audio books. You can also connect it to your computer and use it as a speaker, connect your device to your speakers and you can also get the weather and the news all in one.

One other cool thing is that if you have Amazon Prime you also have Amazon music, which is awesome because you have a whole bunch of free music there you can tell it to play.

Also if you haven’t checked it out already there’s this app called audible from Amazon where you can play audiobooks. You can just tell your device to resume your audiobook and it will start back up where you left off on your phone or on your computer.

So it’s really useful when you’re doing laundry or doing something that you want to still listen to on your phone. Especially when you’re working out or stretching that way you can stay productive.

Connecting the Bluetooth to your laptop makes your setup a lot cleaner because you don’t have extra wires to plug in. You’re just plugging your speakers right to the back of the echo dot or any echo device.

6. Control Your Smart Home

Obviously, as a smart home fanatic, this is one of my favorites. You can control your smart home. You can turn on and off the lights, you can tell your Roomba to go vacuum the floor and you can control your home entertainment system with the Logitech Harmony as we’ve talked about before.

You can also adjust the temperature with your nest thermostats or your smart home devices for your alarm system.

7. Ordering Products Online

Whether you are ordering products online, ordering a pizza or grabbing an uber, this is a very useful tool. For example, you can ask Alexa to order you some toilet paper or batteries or anything else in the house that you use up regularly. To me, that’s just so useful because I always forget those typical household items when I’m making a shopping list.

8. Alexa As A Workout Coach

I don’t use this as much as I should….ahem.

You can use your device as your coach for working out with the seven-minute workout skill. So if you’re kind of lazy like me and usually want to workout at home, but don’t want to look at your phone while you are working out. You can have a coach in your device tell you exactly what you need to do, jumping jacks, push-ups, and how many reps you need to do.

9. Put Alexa In Your Car

Google has had its smart assistant hooked up to cars for quite some time now. But Amazon Alexa has shown itself to be one of the biggest players in the smart home space. So get ready, because you can now put it in your car with Amazon Echo Auto.

It’s a rather small version of the Amazon Echo that sits on the dash of your car and works through the data plan for your smartphone. I personally haven’t had a chance to try this out in my car yet but I’m very excited for the idea in general. 

10. This Day In History

I love this Alexa skill. It’s so fun to be able to ask Alexa what happened on any day of the year in history. You can also ask Alexa for historical events from any other day by saying “Alexa, ask This Day in History what happened on October 31st”, for example. If you are interested you can check out the daily history skill here.

Conclusion

Of course, you can always change alexa’s voice as well, but I’m sure a lot of you have already done that. These are just the top 8 new things that I’ve found that Alexa can do and I’m sure there are a lot more being introduced every day. So keep an eye out as I will more than likely be updating this post throughout the coming year.

Thanks for reading, make sure you check out my facebook page for any updates or new posts like this one.