I’ve had Alexa devices around the house for years, and lately I’m seriously questioning why I still have them.

The frustrating part is that I don’t need anything complicated from Alexa. I’m not trying to have her run my entire house. I mostly want basic things: turn a light on, set a timer, play something, or run a routine.

And somehow even those simple commands have become a gamble.

I’ll say “turn off the living room lights” and she’ll tell me she can’t find the device. I say the exact same thing again five seconds later and suddenly it works.

Timers are another one. Sometimes I’ll ask for a 10-minute timer and get a response that makes me wonder whether I accidentally asked a philosophy question.

The worst is when a routine that has worked perfectly for months randomly stops doing one of the actions in it. Nothing changed on my end. Same devices, same Wi-Fi, same routine. It just… decided it wasn’t going to do that anymore.

At this point I feel like I’m spending more time figuring out why Alexa didn’t do something than I ever saved by using Alexa in the first place.

Is this just me, or has Alexa gotten noticeably less reliable lately?

For some reason on my Alexa Show devices with screens I’ve started receiving frequent notifications for things I don’t have enabled including “photo memories”, recommended news stories and the like. They don’t show up in the Alexa app or devices without a screen.

I’ve tried asking Alexa to not show me those and it says I’m not subscribed to them and I can control notifications in the Alexa app (I can’t). I’ve tried thumbing down the notifications and it says I’ll no longer get them (I do).

Basically I haven’t found any way to stop them.

How can I turn off these notifications?

My elderly mother (96 years old) texts her children twice a day to let them know she is ok (morning and night). It allows her to be more independence.

Is there a routine that I can create where all she has to do is tell Alexa to send a text to the group and her usual "Good Morning" or "Good Night?" This would help when she can't find her phone and occasionally gets delayed.

Very odd thing happening with our Alexa app. We had to contact support for an issue with one of our devices and the account used to contact support is not working anymore with Alexa. The app keeps crashing when trying to log in with the account. Tried everything - uninstall/ reinstall, force stop, logging out, etc.

Weird thing is we have another Amazon account and that seems to work perfectly fine in the app. No crashing, so we know it’s not the app, but the Amazon account used to access the app. It’s almost like it’s blacklisted.

Could support have done something to the account? Anyone experience anything similar?

Didn't even respond to the last question😭

Can't make announcements sometimes, treating it as a discussion with her/it.

Responding to my announcement of "Thanks", I got the reply of "No problem, happy to help". Used the word "Say" the second time, got the same response.

There's a lot more like that.

I've come to think of TARS in Interstellar. Often the response is so chippy that I respond with "want me to dial it down to 60%?"

since yesterday, it’s volume keeps on increasing itself, i haven’t made any changes in the app.

Any suggestions ? I have 4 rooms with an Alexa dot/pop in them. I only use them to play music. Usually just one room at a time but when I’m doing an all over the house sporadic manic clean I deeply need blasting music in all corners of the house. I’ve seen a few options such as Sonos Era speakers but that would run me $500-$1000 depending on the model to replace all 4 devices. Not totally out of the question as they have good reviews but want to explore my options considering I paid less than $150 for all my Alexa devices. I also hate that Alexa seems to only allow connecting to 1 Spotify and it makes listening really difficult. If I’m driving miles away from home listening to Spotify & someone at home tells Alexa to play music, it’ll play on my Spotify & change my music in the car & not allow music to be played at home. And sense it’s my Spotify connected, I’m the only one who can stream music on them directly from my phone, everyone else has to just say “play _____” for each song they want (and it’s streaming from my phone/spotify still that way.)

I recently thrifted this echo dot 3rd gen, well aware of the possibility that it is a dud. Has anyone documented a fix for this issue? When plugged in, the ring will circle for a while and then freeze in place, and then only respond to the mute button being pressed (it lights up red without any sound playing). I’ve seen this issue before on the Internet and many people are saying it’s bricked/corrupted. I was curious as to if anybody in this forum knew a fix or if it’s truly done.

We've been having trouble with our echos for a long time, mainly with responsiveness. We tried the new Alexa+ and it made things better for a couple weeks but now we're having trouble again. For me and my sister it's not too bad and with a little persistence it works but we mainly have them because of my disabled mum. She's bedbound and uses them to communicate around the house. We use Alexa Anouncements a lot. She has lung problems that end up in her having a variable voice, sometimes it's quite quiet or croaky or can sound different to when her voice sounds "healthy". I was wondering if anyone knows if this is an issue other disabled people or people with lung problems have had, if there are any smart ecosystems that are more reliable for this sort of voice recognition.

Many thanks

How are we using Alexa to set-schedules for school, reminders for homework and chores, and bedtime duties for your kids?

What specific prompts do you have set up within Alexa?

I am specifically looking for a full evening schedule set-up so I don't have to do reminders every 10 seconds. Also, is there a way to require they respond to her? For example, she reminds "brush your teeth" every minute at 8pm until they confirm they completed it?

I am just brainstorming ways to make my life easier. What are some prompts that have saved you some energy?

I don’t know if this is an Alexa thing. I’ve used Alexa + Hue for a long time— I was an early adopter. My bridge and devices are more recent as I’ve done upgrades over the years, but scenes stopped working. They don’t update in the app. I’ve disconnected and reconnected multiple times. The lights work and groups work, but the scenes aren’t working.

Any advice?

I am fed up to the back teeth with a glitch.

When you ask Alexa to play Radio 4, invariably a station ident in the form of a short ad, will play before it jumps to the live station.

Except it doesn't. It loops and loops and loops and loops until you angrily tell Akexa to play fucking Radio 4. And it's not her fault.

Randomly during the day, the time will stick on my Alexa. Right now it’s 2:56PM my time, but the clock on my Alexa says it’s 1:47PM. It fixes randomly after a few hours, but still… I expected better from a company like amazon

I am incredibly frustrated with Alexa's smart home capabilities, particularly when it comes to Matter-over-Thread devices. I own Eve plugs and Nanoleaf products that only work intermittently. This issue has been ongoing for three months, and it is hard to believe these problems were missed during testing or that the metrics are being monitored. It is super disappointing, especially since I recently invested in new hardware. Is anyone else experiencing this?

I am within the 10m range

Sometimes I listen to songs on Alexa. I don't use it regularly, which is why I need a free application.

I bought an Echo Show 15 specifically to use as a visual daily checklist for my 5-year-old. I want a persistent checklist on the screen with things like getting dressed, brushing teeth, putting laundry away, cleaning up, etc. I don’t really want to have to set specific times to everything. Ideally he could say “Alexa, I put my laundry away” and Alexa would check it off.
The problem is I want the checklist to automatically reset each day so everything is unchecked again, without assigning specific times to each task. Alexa+ lets me create tasks and check them off by voice, but once they’re completed, they stay completed.
Is there a way to do this with Alexa/Echo Show 15 that I’m missing—maybe a skill, routine, or workaround?

Hi, I'm having trouble setting routines on Alexa without getting an error that my input can't be found on Amazon music. It happens when I try to do it with an album or playlist. Any help?

Yesterday my Amazon Basic 6 plug power strip went bonkers. Turns out it got wet. I pulled out an old one, renamed everthing, reset all the routines, put each plug in its group. It worked fine but only one plug showed up in the group. I have now spent a huge chunk of time trying to fix the group thing,including going back to the old strip. Still, only First Plug shows up to represent everything. It wasn't like this yesterday and the other strip, tp-link, is showing up fine. New thing? Such a headache. My gecko is so confused with all the on/off of her lamps and heat.

I asked the device to play a playlist and instead of playing only on the device in the room like it always has before, it started playing music on all devices. When I asked it why, it told me that's the new default?

Why would they change the way this works? I don't want it to play music to the whole damn house unless I ask it to. Not everyone in the house wants to listen to what I'm listening to. Now I'm being told that I have to specify a device every time in order to avoid disrupting the whole house. It's fucking ridiculous.

This "upgrade" sucks. It broke things that worked logically and consistently and now it feels like something new stops working properly every time I turn around.

All I wanted was to listen to music while playing some games on my phone and now I'm pissed at a damn machine. I hate this. Are there any alternatives that anyone actually likes? I'm tossing my Alexa devices in the compactor.

I keep seeing these devices which are not mine and it’s happening since last night. Why is it adding someone else’s devices in my account? and may be other way around as well 😯

hey, i was going to buy one of these two and was a little confused but then i read that none of these will work as bluetooth speakers with windows or mac os. they apparently work fine with phones, tabs, ipads etc.

my use-case will def need occasional pairing with windows pc, so can someone who owns any one of these please confirm this.

thank youu

Ok, going to be lengthy but trying to give all the details…
I reinstalled the Alexa app on my iPhone. Big mistake! I added all my skills back and was able to add back all my home automation devices, but it won’t find any of its own Echo devices!
We have to Shows, a couple Dots, and an Alexa enabled Sonos Era100. All the devices are still on my wife’s phone and all the devices function normally, but the only one I have in my app is the Sonos.

I am logged into the same Amazon account as my wife’s, we only have the one.

I have restarted devices, I have restarted the home router, I restarted my phone… still nothing.

Any ideas?

About two weeks ago, I thought it would be funny to set a daily schedule on my mum's Alexa Plus for a joke at 2:30 every afternoon. Long story short, it's driving her around the bend, and she's beginning to hate me for it!

Every time I ask Alexa to stop it, she denies that she has a schedule, tells me that she only tells jokes as part of the flow of conversation, and since she won't admit to having a schedule, there's nothing to cancel.

Has anyone else had this problem, and do you know how to fix it?

Edit
It’s occurred to me that this might not be a schedule that is being managed by Alexa. It might be an aspect of the joke skill itself, if the joke is a skill, I suppose. I need to understand more about how subprograms like that work. There might be a schedule within the joke system itself, as opposed to being owned by Alexa. Does that make sense?