Quote:
Originally Posted by tubemonkey
Could be. They're not listed in Alexa's list of baked-in skills.
TuneIn was my favorite streamer for radio stations on Alexa and it was baked-in. Stations were super easy to request. Then iHeart (also baked-in) removed their stations from Tunein and it's now a real pain to get Alexa to understand the station I want. To make matters worse, Entercom just pulled all of their stations from TuneIn. Now none of my favorite local radio stations are available on TuneIn. On the bright side, Alexa understands my requests for the Entercom stations, unlike iHeart.
Now here's the kicker. Entercom's streaming app for stations is Radio.com and when I request a station, Alexa repeats it back and adds "on Radio.com". The thing is, I never enabled that skill, nor is it listed in Alexa's baked-in skill set.
So it appears that Radio.com is one of those hidden skills like Hulu and Netflix. It would be nice if we could get a list of all skills baked into Alexa.
Final rant. My Echo Dot used to be my go-to radio for local stations. That's no longer the case. Now I use one of my older no contract phones with a built-in FM tuner. For an antenna, I use an old pair of earbuds with the buds cut off. Works great and it's much quicker to play and change stations than Alexa currently is.
Funny how older technology is a better solution in this scenario than newer technology  |
Yep, here is something similar to what I used as a kid growing up in the 1960's:
Worked pretty well and those old AM stations could be heard from hundreds of miles away! And during the winter those vacuum tubes could keep you warm. FM was not an option in my area then, and you didn't even have FM radios in most cars back then either.