Now you can talk to Alexa in Amazon's Alexa app

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Works great!

Only flaw I have come across so far is if you are within ear shot of any of your Echo devices while you are talking to Alexa on the phone, and you say “Alexa (wake word)”, she will respond/react on the phone and also on the Echo that heard you. She doesn’t have the same cancel out functionality on the phone that the Echos share between themselves.

Lesson learned - After pressing button on phone, simply ask or say your command without using your wake word (not needed), then you can avoid the issue up above. :slight_smile:

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Is there a setting for the cancellation functionality or does it just not work in my setup? When I talk to my kitchen echo it carries right down the stairwell to the Dot in my den
I changed the wake word to eliminate the issue but I’d rather call them both Alexa if I can.

The feature is called Echo Spatial Perception, (ESP) and is just the default on Amazon branded devices. (I’m pretty sure partner ‘Alexa Enabled’ devices can’t do this yet) It may have some trouble if you are about halfway between the devices. Otherwise if you have the activation tone turned on and say the wake word you will likely hear the ready tone from all devices in range. However, once you actually make a request, only the closest device actually responds.

In my home I have three Dots that can hear me if I’m halfway down the main hall and occasionally it responds from two, but usually it does a really good job of figuring it out.

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Maybe the delay from echoing down the stairwell messes with the processing. It was happening pretty reliably that I’d try to put on music in the kitchen (from 3-5 ft away) and be told that it was already streaming on another device, because apparently somehow the unit in the den got there first.

Amazon Alexa is a free app that works great. You can setup and control Alexa with echo devices like echo dot, echo plus, echo look etc. Without Alexa, you can’t communicate with echo device. Just say some words or ask any question, you can get quick response from Alexa.