Alexa Calling and Messaging

In old-style terminology, “whole house intercom” means all the devices in the house play the announcement. That’s what is currently available with Alexa, and that is what we use.

Device to device calling is not available as yet unless the separate devices are on separate Amazon accounts.

But for our usage, having all the devices ring at the same time is what we want, we would use this when we don’t know where the person is in the house.

.2. I would like feedback as to your contacts lists in the companion app.
When a contact was added to your Alexa app, and that contact had multiple phone numbers in your phones contact book, did multiple numbers pull into your contact list? (IE: home, mobile, office)?
Do you like that? Do you think only the associated number with the Alexa calling should pull in?
Does it confuse the user that only the number associated can be used (you can’t call their office from Alexa currently) IE: call John mobile, or call John work.

It doesn’t work that way. The only number that it picks up is the one that is associated with the other person’s Amazon account. It doesn’t pull in multiple numbers for them. So you are calling the other person’s Amazon account, you were not calling any of their phones directly. Nobody in my extended family has found that confusing.

The Blocking feature. Is it confusing that a name appears more than once in the Blocking section - but it is associated to ONE number only? IE: Mary only has one phone number, she shows up twice in your block list, one as Mary and one as Mary’s home? Does the user know the difference of in app calling and home/ calling from a device.

I’m not able to follow this because I don’t think that’s how it works. Again, there’s just one number associated with the person from Alexa’s point of view, that’s the number of their Amazon account.

I have four numbers for my brother in my phone’s contact book: home landline, personal mobile, work mobile, and office landline. But his amazon account is associated only with his personal mobile, and that’s the only number that’s available to block.

.3. Call placed from. If you are in a household with multiple users(which sounds like you are JD, but I don’t know your account settings) when outbound calls are placed from different users, what is the receiver hearing as the to who is calling. Is there “mis-matches” as there are no prompts and directs when making a call or leaving message for someone. IE: “Alexa, call mom” “ok, you want to call mom is that right?” vs. Who is this call from (within the household account) John or Mary?

At the present time, all the calls will appear to come from one user name, the one associated with the Amazon account. We do have a separate echo device that is on my housemate’s Amazon account, and if he makes calls from that one it says it’s coming from him. All the other devices are on my account, and a call from any one of them would say it was coming from me even if my housemate was placing a call.

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Thank you for your feedback. Sounds like we have some very different experiences.

I’m using an iPhone, if that makes any difference. If you have any questions about it, I would just contact Amazon support. I’ve found them very helpful.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=201952240

You can go ahead and localize your Echos by assigning them different accounts. That will allow what you want, though it has downsides.

Btw I get what you want and why. I want similar things, and have posted about it here and shared it with their programming team. But I grasp that this is not an all-or-nothing thing, where they should wait til everything is exactly as Mike Maxwell wishes before they make any updates to the system. And… back before cellphones, what happened if someone called your phone number? Did it ring on every phone in the house? Answer is YES… unless you had multiple phone accounts (with separate numbers).

So no, this is not a huge fail. It is incremental increase in functionality. If it ain’t your thing, you can sell off your Dots and wait for Apple’s new product…

peace out bro…

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Poll time…

When I 1st set this up it rang to every dot in the house. Then the other day the wife was in the baby’s room and answered the call there. The next time I called the house it rang in the baby’s room and not in any others. It was not until I unplugged every dot and plugged them back in that they started to ring to all echos again. I just hope that I can at least use the 2 shows that I got the way I want. As long as I can communicate between the 2 one in living room one in bedroom, I will be happy.

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Your use case of a nursery is exactly the DROP IN feature of the SHOW.
All of your devices should “ring” in your account if you say call home on one of your devices. Just to double check, you did not have DND enabled on any of those devices that didn’t ring, correct? You can enable DND on any device - by speaking to the device or within the companion app. Sometimes things get turned on or off and forgotten what state they are in. The light ring illuminated purple indicates you have activated or disabled DND.

So the 2 shows will be able to communicate no problem even being on the same account?

yes, that is the idea of the “drop in” This is a feature that will have to be “authorized” but when you call on the device in the nursery there is a 10 second opt out, and the video will go live without an “accept” command. “Alexa, drop in on the nursery” and you should see your angel (sleeping hopefully)!

Thank you, Question, on the drop in, you have to wait 10 sec for live video? Can that be reduced by settings?

My understanding that on the roll out that is a hard set feature. Feature requests are always able to be made on the developer site.
It gives an “adult” an option if they are quick enough to not accept that video going live. I suppose 10 seconds could seem long if you thought you heard something in a baby’s room.

Bingo!! However, the show is for the master and the living room, my daughter already has a Dot.:smiley:

In the coming weeks, Alexa will make it even easier to tell when you have a new voice or text message by displaying a yellow light ring on your Echo device.

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Amazon is so close. (I’m still living in the world where I can get push notifications on the Echo…)

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So I bought the Echo Show for my mom who is older. I’ll be paying for her new internet service, but sadly she still uses a dumbphone because it’s cheaper. I’ve discovered that setting up Alexa for her, requires me to set up a new user on my android phone, connecting to her own Google account with a separate contacts list. From my testing so far, this should work. They’ve marketed the Show to people who want to check in on older family members, but many do not have a smartphone. Hopefully they will allow manual additions to the Alexa app.

I wonder if it’s a way to help shield Echo users from spam callers.

Today, Amazon rolled out Alexa intercom functionality. I don’t have it yet, but it’s out there and apparently works well. You just say “call basement dot” or something (syntax as yet unknown) and it does that. It also apparently has the ability to listen in on a room.

Hello, I got my 2 shows today, but I cannot get the drop in feature to work. It keeps telling me to go to the alexa app and enable the contact for drop in, but there is no feature to do that. Any ideas?

You will need to ensure you have the latest mobile app…Just installed and got the non-show devices working!

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I would contact Amazon support. They’re always very helpful. :sunglasses:

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