Amazon Echo Club

[OtinG]

Originally Posted by ApK

Over the last couple days, I'd give Alexa commands that we use regularly, like "kitchen off," and rather than beeping (she's in brief mode) and turning off the kitchen lights as normal, she'll say "It's off," and do nothing. I'm about to dig into the activity to see if she's hearing something different than I'm saying, or if she has just taken up outright lying and willful disobedience.
Neither would surprise me at this point.

I will ask her something like “Set color bath light to 100%” and she will say there is no device named color bath light. There is, and a subsequent command to turn it up to 100% brightness works. I keep thinking one of these days she and Siri will either get into a yelling match, or worse, plot to kick me out of the house!

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by OtinG

I keep thinking one of these days she and Siri will either get into a yelling match, or worse, plot to kick me out of the house!

...if they kick you out of your house, I'll start a GoFundMe for you

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by John F

So when you use ask Alexa to play a specific song with Apple Music you don't have a problem?

Sometimes. But that's trying to get the correct version of a song in most cases.

But I know Alexa understood my song request as it repeated it the first time it played the wrong song.

[ApK]

Clearly Amazon is in the process of creating yet another "Gaslight" remake for Prime Video featuring Alexa in the Charles Boyer role, and all of us customers in the Ingrid Bergman role.

"Alexa, raise gaslight to 100%."
"Gaslight is already at 100%. It was never any dimmer.. And there's no device called gaslight. You're insane."

[John F]

One step forward, 2 steps back...

So they added 98 million songs, that's great.

But When I try to shuffle an artist, which is how a normally use Prime Music, it mixes in other "similar" artists, and the mix seems rather aggressive with other artists. Whereas previously, it would just shuffle that one artist.

Time to call Amazon support.

[OtinG]

With the free Amazon music they had a bad habit of playing the worst editions of songs. I don't usually care for live recordings. I prefer the studio cuts, but we got a lot of the live recordings instead. I switched to Apple Music paid version where you can choose which version you want. Just don't use Siri to find it or you will get frustrated in a hurry! I use the iPhone or iPad to search for songs and to create playlists.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by OtinG

With the free Amazon music they had a bad habit of playing the worst editions of songs. I don't usually care for live recordings. I prefer the studio cuts, but we got a lot of the live recordings instead. I switched to Apple Music paid version where you can choose which version you want. Just don't use Siri to find it or you will get frustrated in a hurry! I use the iPhone or iPad to search for songs and to create playlists.

I don't care for live versions either. I listen to most of my music on Spotify via albums and playlists. That way, I get the studio versions and the songs I want to hear.

Even with this expansion for Prime Music, I won't listen to it. It has no value for me.

[issybird]

Ack! So I asked Alexa to play a symphony that had been in my Prime Music library and got the rigamarole about how now I can access all the music in Amazon in shuffle mode. Which scared me; I don’t want to listen to a symphony in shuffle, thankyouverymuch, but when the first movement started I relaxed. Even Alexa, I thought, realized that a symphony was not the same as an album of discrete songs.

Oh, issy, you idiot. After the first movement, Alexa started to play, could it be, the theme song from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast!

I’m so, so tired of “improvements” that are anything but. I can work with a limited list of music, so long as I control what I listen to from it. This is a freaking disaster. And now I wonder if my curated Christmas playlist is DOA. Because that is one of the reasons I’m willing (or was willing) to pay for Prime.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by issybird

Ack! So I asked Alexa to play a symphony that had been in my Prime Music library and got the rigamarole about how now I can access all the music in Amazon in shuffle mode. Which scared me; I don’t want to listen to a symphony in shuffle, thankyouverymuch, but when the first movement started I relaxed. Even Alexa, I thought, realized that a symphony was not the same as an album of discrete songs.

Oh, issy, you idiot. After the first movement, Alexa started to play, could it be, the theme song from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast!

Tried it again using different language, because I obviously don’t learn. This time she told me, in so many words, that she was going to shuffle two different symphonies from the same composer with “similar music”.

So much for that Prime benefit.

[CRussel]

Well, while all this is true, it's also still true that one _can_ create playlists and/or play an individual album. But Alexa's not the way to deal with that.

[John F]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Well, while all this is true, it's also still true that one _can_ create playlists and/or play an individual album. But Alexa's not the way to deal with that.

Are you sure? I just tried shuffling a playlist, using the Amazon music app, and the first song was not from the playlist.

Also, I was only able to skip three times, and then it said I needed Amazon Music unlimited.

[mlewis78]

I tried listening to music through the Amazon Music app on my phone while I was out. The first two tries I thought I selected an album, but it gave me two songs from it and then other songs by other artists. Finally, after I chose a James Galway C.P.E. Bach Concerto album, it worked. I think I pressed on the album photo. There was no play button, only shuffle buttons. I want to stop paying Apple $10 a month for music, but I have to make this work better. A lot of my music on Amazon I uploaded to it years ago (can't do that now) and I see that I have to "add it" to my music before I can play it.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by mlewis78

I tried listening to music through the Amazon Music app on my phone while I was out. The first two tries I thought I selected an album, but it gave me two songs from it and then other songs by other artists. Finally, after I chose a James Galway C.P.E. Bach Concerto album, it worked. I think I pressed on the album photo. There was no play button, only shuffle buttons. I want to stop paying Apple $10 a month for music, but I have to make this work better. A lot of my music on Amazon I uploaded to it years ago (can't do that now) and I see that I have to "add it" to my music before I can play it.

We have Prime music, and I asked Alexa to play "American Storm" (by Bob Seger). She said "Here's American Storm and other songs like it." She did in fact play the named song first, and then proceeded to play a bunch of other classic rock I didn't ask for. Weird.


BTW, she now invariably refuses to turn off my kitchen lights with the command "Kitchen off" as she has done for years. That command elicits the response "It's off" and does nothing else as far as I can tell. The command "Turn off the kitchen" works fine. I've gotten around this by creating a routine called "kitchen off" which explicitly turns off the lights, but I don't like layers of crud complicating a setup needlessly.


ApK

[OtinG]

Yep, she keeps telling me that certain named devices don't exist, but a repeat command works.

I use the name Ziggy for her in my LR so as to avoid accidental activations. That usually works pretty well. However a few nights ago I was watching a crime drama on Britbox in which a character was called Ziggy, and they were constantly calling out that name. I had to turn off the mic because she would hear it and start answering totally unrelated questions. I keep the mic turned off on my Fire TV Cube 3rd gen for that same reason, but this was on an older Echo Plus 2 beside my recliner.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by OtinG

I use the name Ziggy for her in my LR so as to avoid accidental activations. That usually works pretty well. However a few nights ago I was watching a crime drama on Britbox in which a character was called Ziggy, and they were constantly calling out that name.

I've got an older Echo Dot that I "Ziggied" for a very similar reason. Then I was watching the Quantum Leap reboot last night, and everything fell apart.