Alexa Gets More Powerful Routines, Email Integration, More

Amazon’s Alexa is getting some major features today. Just in time for the holidays, Amazon is announcing a bunch of new features that will help you get things done more quickly and efficiently with the latest Alexa update.

First, let’s talk about routines. Alexa can now trigger location-based routines and reminders. This means you can configure Alexa to trigger a certain routine, like turning on your room’s lights, when you enter your house, etc. Similarly, the location-based reminders allow Alexa to remind you when you leave a certain location or reach somewhere.

Routines are also getting more powerful with support for sleep timers for music so you can automatically pause music after a certain time and schedule the music playback, and they can now even be designed with intervals between different actions. The company now lets parents set up kid-friendly routines as well.

Alexa is also picking up better email integration, now allowing you to check your email using commands like “Alexa, check my email” and “Alexa, did I get an email from [contact]?.” You can use Alexa to respond to emails, delete emails, or archive them. The integration supports both Outlook and Gmail, and you can even set a personalized voice PIN to prevent others in the house from reading your private emails.

And lastly, Alexa now lets you add additional time to your timers, so you can do things like “Alexa, add five minutes to my timer” or remove time from your timers, reports VentureBeat.

Alexa’s latest update is quite major to be honest, even though it’s only available to users in the United States. Even if you don’t have an Echo speaker, these features should be available through the Alexa app on Windows 10 and other platforms, so make sure to check them out.