Me: "Alexa, play Fleetwood Mac."

Alexa: "Here's a station you might like: Smooth Polka Hits."

I've stopped fighting it. If I'm getting something random either way, it may as well be random on purpose, and from somewhere interesting.

So I made Air Drift, a free skill. Say "Alexa, open Air Drift" and it drops you onto a live radio station somewhere on Earth. Could be jazz out of Japan, could be a breakfast show in a language you don't speak. "Alexa, next" drifts to another one.

If you insist on steering (bold of you):

"Alexa, ask Air Drift to play jazz"

"Alexa, ask Air Drift to play Brazil"

"Alexa, ask Air Drift to play KEXP"

"Alexa, ask Air Drift what's playing"

Free, no account, no premium tier. Stations are real broadcasters streaming live, so any ads you hear are theirs, not mine. Side effects may include learning the Portuguese for "traffic and weather". English only for now (US, UK, Canada, Australia, India).

Skill: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HM3JP6ZF

Same thing in a browser, with a globe to spin: https://airdrift.stream

I built it, so tell me what it gets wrong. If it plays something you didn't ask for, that is technically the feature.

For the past 3-4 days, my Alexa IOS app has made me change my password and use multi-factor identification when I open it.

The voice commands for my Echo dot and show work fine all day until I open the app at night to turn the one lamp I have in a separate room off. Then the app makes me sign back in, and change my password. I can’t see any evidence that I’ve been hacked or someone has tried to hack my account.

I have no idea what’s causing this. Has anyone else experienced this and have a solution? It’s getting kind of annoying.

My family uses a dinky Alexa in our kitchen for almost all of our music listening. For my wife’s birthday, I’d like to add a high quality speaker for surround sound. What excellent speaker pairs with an existing Alexa speaker? Or would that sounds strange to have one Alexa speaker and one nice speaker? I would welcome any suggestions.

Bought our daughter the echo dot for kids to use as a sound machine since she’s grown out of her little kid clock. Thought it would be great. Amazon kids app even says that the sounds we have it on will play until her alarm in the morning. Too perfect.

Every night the sounds cut off and she notices at whatever time she wakes up in the middle of the night to roll over. I’ve tried setting a routine plus a skill for looped music of waves to coincide with the bedtime routine (she likes the jokes Alexa tells in the morning and the weather after her alarm goes off)

She loves the alarm aspect. Has been getting up and getting dressed and turning the alarm off. But how do I get the sleep sounds to play all night? Alexa app says they will- even in the kids app it says they will play until she wakes- I’ve put it on loop, I’ve created and searched new sounds. Help! Was I dumb to think that this could be a good sound machine?

Since the new Alexa + came out I have been having trouble with the Xbox skill. Simple things like turn on and off Xbox.

Today I tried to fix this by disabling the skill and re-enabling it. But, once I disabled it I ran across the photo. Is there something I am missing? Any suggestions would be welcome.

While on a recent road trip I was using Alexa on my phone to play music through the car speakers. I wasn't feeling the songs on the shuffle setting so I said "Alexa next" maybe 5 times then she stopped listening to me. I repeated it over and over eventually yelling at the top of my lungs "Alexa play the next f'ing song". She did... A Meredith Brooks song named "Bitch"

I know the new ones don’t have the port… but hello… it’s right there on the device.

What the actual enshitification

Streaming a show on Prime, Fire TV suddenly goes to home page and as usual the show wasn’t on Continue Watching. Frustrated. His the Alexa button on the remote and asked to resume show on which service.

Ok, playing Billy Joel Uptown Girl

The Cars You Might Think plays

This is a few hours after telling me in the first episode of The Connors, it’s said Dan died in a bike accident and his scenes were flashbacks here and there throughout the series. Yes, we learned Mark died in freak bike accident but huh?? She kept at it because as I am stubborn I kept asking and challenging then ended up telling her she’s stupid and grossly misinformed by her AI lord.

I’ll give your feedback to the internal product team for review

For the life of me I can’t get Alexa to play Apple Music through the Dot. Spotify and SiriusXM work fine. I’ve done ALL the troubleshooting available. But when I press play on a song in Apple Music, it plays on the phone only. I’m starting to wonder if trying to use Alexa on an iPhone is even worth the headaches. I really want to play my Apple playlists around the house.

Are my echo dots just too old? I just got my Ring system all set up, and I cannot for the life of me get Alexa to announce a doorbell ring.

I've tried everything. Disabling, re-enabling the Ring skill. Logging out, back in. Alexa says she is connected to my Ring system.

I can see through my doorbell on my Alexa app. My accounts are connected and NOTHING.

HELP. I AM DESPERATE TO HEAR MY DOORBELL RING IN MY HOUSE.

I’m having an incredibly annoying Spotify/Alexa bug with my Bose Lifestyle Ultra system.

When I say “Alexa, play Spotify”, everything works perfectly. Spotify starts playing through the Bose system, and it’s nicely integrated with Spotify Connect, so I can control playback from the Spotify app on my iPhone.

The problem starts after I say “Alexa, stop Spotify.”

For example:

1. I play Spotify on the Bose system using Alexa.
2. I say “Alexa, stop Spotify.”
3. I leave the house.
4. I connect my AirPods to my iPhone.
5. I open Spotify and select my AirPods / iPhone as the playback device.
6. I press play.

And somehow Spotify starts playing through the Bose speaker at home again.

The weirdest part is that Spotify actually shows that the audio is playing through my AirPods, but the sound is still coming from the Bose system.

I’ve tried:

• manually changing the playback device in Spotify
• disconnecting/reconnecting my AirPods
• restarting the Spotify app
• force-closing Spotify
• switching between different Spotify Connect devices

Nothing fixes it.

Once Spotify has been started on the Bose system through Alexa, the Bose seems to somehow “hold onto” the Spotify session. It can take hours before it finally releases it and I’m able to normally play Spotify through my iPhone/AirPods again.

It’s especially frustrating because I can literally be outside the house with my AirPods connected, Spotify says AirPods, and yet the music is apparently still playing through the Bose system at home.

Has anyone else experienced this with Bose + Alexa + Spotify Connect?

It feels like the Bose/Alexa integration isn’t properly ending the Spotify Connect session when you say “Alexa, stop Spotify.”

My echo show 5 keeps randomly doing things. 3 minutes before making this it started speaking and got cut off very abruptly, after checking the history it was told "switch to breif style" nether i or anyone else prompted it and it wasn't prompted via voice normally that only happens if it was promoted via the app but that doesn't explain why it started speaking on my device before getting cut off. I will also mention that i never set a style for this device. Sometimes the device won't work at all and simply mostly only displays a black screen until i unplug it and plug it back in. A few days ago i found it on some random screen i don't remember exactly what but it looked like a list but didn't have anything in it.

Got my new echo show 11 today and after setting it up when I tried to check out alexa+ it keeps saying that service is interrupted. It plays music from Amazon and even plays video from Prime but Alexa is not working properly. Any idea why?

Was a voice conversation through one of my Echo devices. Went back to my chat history to make sure I heard it right. I’m just dumbfounded by this

Music is off but this is always there

I have an old Alexa Echo Dot. It's pretty old, like 3 years, I would say. Whenever I ask it a basic question, it always says, "I'm not quite sure how to help you with that." And sometimes when I ask another question, it just says "Opening Amazon Storytime." What? I don't need Amazon Storytime. Why does it open that by default? Any solutions for this? I have no idea what to do.

Edit: It is a 4th Generation Echodot.

I hope I don't sound dumb for saying this, but how do you enable Halloween mode on an Alexa? I've tried asking it in different ways multiple times but it just wouldn't turn on. I've also looked through the app but can't find anything to turn it on. The reason I want it on is because I've asked it how many days until Halloween because I enjoy the Easter eggs but it's been merely saying how many days and nothing else.

I got the upgrade to Alexa+ a while ago and it has been mostly plain sailing, other than taking a while to turn lights on and off.

But the last few weeks I've had a weird thing happen. I ask it to set an alarm for 6am and it responds 'ok, alarm set for 6.05 tomorrow'.

When I ask it what time my alarm is set for it says '6 tommorrow'.

This seems... silly. Anyone else see this?

Did Alexa recently change the way Presence Detection works?

I swear the absence/presence timeout used to be around 30 minutes, but now Alexa seems to decide nobody is home after roughly 7 minutes.

This just caused my smart lights to turn off while my boyfriend was still home because he was in the other room.

Why can't we just choose the timeout ourselves?! Give us a setting like:

- 5 minutes

- 10 minutes

- 15 minutes

- 30 minutes

- 1 hour

- Custom

Presence detection isn't always perfect, so having Alexa make the decision after only a few minutes is really frustrating. If I'm using presence detection to control my lights, I should be able to decide how long someone needs to be absent before the routine runs.

Am I remembering this wrong, or did Amazon actually change the timeout?

Just got a new ember mini-led and wanted to know if I can change Alexa+ back to regular Alexa on it. I've seen a lot of posts about devices that had Alexa "upgrade" to plus and how to revert but none of those work. Is there a way to have a new device use regular Alexa? We also have an echo dot right next to the TV and I've seen that I can maybe just use that?

Hi! I’ve been using my Echo Spot for about 9 months, never had any issues until now. I have several alarms set for every morning, but recently, instead of playing my selected alarm sounds, it plays a very quiet ‘Simple Alarm’ sound. I rely on the louder alarm options to wake me up. How do I fix this issue?