ANSWERED: If You Use an Alexa Voice Remote for Amazon Echo, PLEASE Read This :-)

Devices & Integrations
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Greetings, fellow Alexa users. :slight_smile:

I am interested in knowing something about this Alexa Remote from Amazon.
I will be getting one soon, but since I don’t have one yet, I’m asking you for a hand with something.

If you have one of these Remotes (i.e. NOT the one for FireTV, but the one specifically sold for use with Echo), please help me out by doing a quick, simple experiment…

  1. Disable the microphones on your Echo device via the built-in mic-disable button on the Echo device.

  2. Use the paired Alexa Remote to attempt to send a command to your Echo device as you normally would, but this time, while the Echo device has its own microphones disabled as per step one above.

  3. Report back here to tell me if it worked or not.

WHY?
I’m trying to figure out if there is any way of commanding Alexa through an Echo device which is currently in ‘microphones-disabled’ mode through any other medium or mechanism.

For more details on that, please see the following thread…

“POSSIBLE SOLUTION (see UPDATE in the OP): How To Programatically Trigger Alexa to Wake/Pay Attention?”

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Yes, that works.

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You should be able to do it just from the echo app as well. but neither of those will re-enable the microphone on the original echo device, which I thought was what you were trying to do.

For example, if I disable the microphone on the kitchen echo, The red light will come on and that particular device will no longer listen for the wake word.

Then I can use the Alexa app to start playing a specific podcast on the kitchen echo. The kitchen echo will indeed start playing the podcast, but it was still have the red light on and it will still not hear the wake word. I have to physically press the microphone button on the kitchen echo to re-enable the microphone.

The echo voice remote works the same way. You can use it to get some commands to its Paired echo device, but executing those commands will not re-enable the microphone if it was disabled with the physical microphone button.

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@Nezmo
Sweet! Thanks a lot for checking and letting me know. :smiley:

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@JDRoberts
Indeed. However, that is just like interacting with any other Echo device. So, it does not get at what I was trying to do here. :slight_smile:

Nah. I never wanted to actually change the ‘mic-disabled’ setting on the Echo device. I just wanted to be able to interact with it somehow while it was in that state.

So, this current thread expresses (in the simplest way I could figure out how to say it) exactly what I was trying to do, and the test and report from @Nezmo above gives me the info I was looking for, and confirms that I now have a good, workable solution to the task I was originally trying to figure out in that other thread.

Thanks a lot for all of your help and discussion throughout this latest adventure, man. :slight_smile:

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