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The modern voice assistant Alexa has become an integral part of the well-equipped smart home. Anyone who has once enjoyed the convenience of an Echo Dot will soon no longer want to do without the flexible voice control of household appliances. It is also possible to run Alexa’s software on Windows 10. In order for communication to be as reliable as users are used to with an Echo Dot, some configurations have to be carried out on some PCs, but for some manufacturers the Alexa hands-free mode is also available immediately after loading the Windows app.
What can Alexa do?
New skills are released for Alexa every day. The voice assistant not only enables the operation of smart electrical devices in your own household, the smart Echo Dot from Amazon can also be used to control and monitor calendar functions. If you give Alexa a wake-up time, the handy input device can, for example, switch on the radio, activate the lighting or simply play a loud signal at the specified time, which is guaranteed to wake everyone up from their sleep.
Alexa offers a clear summary of all activities of the day in a short summary for the private as well as for the business area. However, only those events are shown which have been actively instructed. If, for example, the Echo Dot listened to how guests came to visit, but no active instructions were given in this regard, such an event does not appear in the daily summary. The situation is similar with the postman who delivered a package. Alex will not summarize “the delivery came at 3:00 pm”.
Nevertheless, it is possible for Alexa to carry out the same actions every week at fixed times of the day. Recurring events are called an Alexa routine. These routines can be selected differently for the days of the week than for the weekends or public holidays. With an update of the personal calendar, the Echo Dot can learn when the holidays are in your state, when the holidays are in this school year and of course Alexa reliably reminds you of all birthdays and important anniversaries.
Alexa, cook eggs!
In the kitchen, the Echo Dot can replace the dusty minute minder. Unlike the timer function in the smartphone or tablet PC, Alexa does not have to be touched to activate skills and execute commands. This can be of tremendous help when cooking and baking, especially when your hands are stuck in the dough and no kitchen towel is quickly available.
With the right skill, Alexa also plays the video from the Internet, on which the cooking instructions can be seen step by step. The Echo Dot can pause the video or rewind it if necessary. So cooking recipes with Alexa becomes an exciting pleasure and if an egg falls on the floor, luckily she doesn’t notice. Alexa can operate the coffee machine in the smart home, the intelligent oven or the smart egg cooker, provided all smart modules are in the same smart home system. You just have to make sure that there are actually eggs in the cooker or frozen pretzels in the oven.
Good conversation with Alexa
The smart Echo Dot plays your favorite music with the appropriate skill, you can listen to web radio or simply put together a playlist of your absolute top hits. At the party, Alexa provides fun entertainment games with her skills, and you can also play alone with the Echo Dot Quizze or educational games. This is how you combine further training and learning with entertaining components. Above all, you don’t have to look into the vocabulary to learn foreign languages with the Echo Dot. The children also “reads aloud†to the children. You can easily play any kind of audiobook via the Echo Dot and pause at any time, for example when the children have fallen asleep or you have something to do, which would disturb listening to the audiobook.
Connect Alexa to Windows 10
As mentioned at the beginning, some computers can easily install Alexa on the Windows 10 operating system. So that you can enjoy all the benefits of hands-free operation of Alexa on your PC, there is a free guide to configure Alexa under Windows 10: How to use Amazon Alexa with Windows 10.