Show and Tell

[davidgillon]

My sister and I picked up a couple of Amazon Echo Show 5s on Prime Day (half price at £40 and I had a couple of £25 vouchers to use), on the theory that they're potentially simple enough my mother will agree to have one - zero chance of getting her to use a smartphone or tablet, never mind a desktop - and so be able to see me even if we're stuck at opposite ends of the country.

So we've just spent two hours trying to get them to talk to each other. As soon as we'd gotten each other into our Amazon contacts they'd happily call our phones if we said "Alexa Call <sibling>", we just couldn't get them to call the blasted Shows instead and couldn't work out what we were doing wrong. So eventually we agreed to give up for the minute and I'd go off and do some research.

So I queued up the youtube vid I'd watched before buying, hopped to the bit where he calls his dad, immediately stopped it again, and *headdesk*ed a couple of times, because the command isn't  "Alexa Call", it's "Alexa Video Call". *headdesk*

I suppose it does show the limitations of Amazon's documentation style, which in the case of the Show amounts to four not very packed credit card sized pages, but that's still annoyingly obvious.

At one point in trying to sort it out I had three different Alexa enabled devices in front of me (Show, tablet and PC), plus my sister on the other end of the line with her Show and tablet and every time one of us forgot and said "Alexa" every bloody one of them would try and respond. I didn't even realise my PC had an active mic until Alexa reacted!

Comments

[serene]

Unsolicited datapoint: What we ended up doing is "Alexa, drop in on mom" or "...on upstairs" and that worked much better than calling.

[davidgillon]

It's slightly problematic if the Show is in a room you are occasionally undressed in!

[serene]

Fair enough!!