A Comprehensive List of Alexa Skills

A Comprehensive List of Alexa Skills

Acting as your own personal assistant,  Amazon Alexa allows you to ask a wide range of questions, as well as access an ever-growing number of features using just the sound of your voice. Start using these commands as soon as you set up your Alexa device!

What’s Alexa and What Can It Do?

Alexa is Amazon’s proprietary speech-driven service, similar to what Siri is for the iPhone. 

Commands to the service are known as skills; these capabilities run the gamut from playing a particular song to raising the temperature on your thermostat.

The most popular Alexa-enabled device is Amazon Echo, but the voice service is also available on Fire TV and other select Amazon and third-party products such as the Aristotle baby monitor and LG’s Hub Robot. 

While Alexa can use the thousands and thousands of skills that are available, there are a few things to keep in mind.

  • Not all of these skills were developed by Amazon. Developers have access to write and publish their own skills for Alexa that then become available to users like yourself.
  • Some of these skills may not be worth your time, simply because they aren’t very helpful or enjoyable.
  • Certain skills may require additional hardware (i.e., turning on a light with Alexa)

This shouldn’t scare you away, however. Alexa-enabled devices are great to have in your home and, with a little tweaking, can prove to be very good companions.

I’ve hand-picked some of the most useful and unique Alexa skills from the thousands that are out there. Many of these skills will not be enabled by default, so you may need to follow the proper activation steps before using each one for the first time. 

How to Get Started

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The complete list of Alexa commands

 
 

Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa, is infiltrating your home, your beach trips and even your ride to work. Now that there are many ways to interact with Alexa — with the TapEchoEcho DotEcho LookEcho ShowDash Wand and the Amazon Fire TV — you might find yourself talking to her more often.

The list of commands is expanding rapidly, as is the number of third-party services and devices that Alexa officially (and unofficially) supports.

Here is the (almost) complete list of Amazon Alexa commands.

Summoning Alexa

By default, Amazon’s connected speakers have the same wake word. All you have to do to queue up a request is say, “Alexa.” In the Amazon Alexa mobile application or at echo.amazon.com, you can change the wake word to either AmazonEcho or Computer.

If you have an Amazon Tap, Dash Wand or the Amazon Fire TV voice remote, you’ll need to press a button to wake Alexa.

Amazon updated the Tap with a hands-free mode that you must enable in the settings. The only wake word available to the Amazon Tap is Alexa.

Editors’ note: Originally published on April 13, 2016, this article is regularly updated to include new Alexa commands, features and information.

The complete list of Alexa commands

The list of Alexa commands is expansive and grows with every new service or device it supports. Alexa isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty great at understanding natural language, so you don’t always have to speak the commands exactly as you see them below. Many commands work when worded several different ways or even with words omitted.

 

 

 

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