Alexa Plus

I've read in the past that most echo dots and some of the older regular echos should gain access to Alexa plus, but no clue when that will happen. It's a real shame that Amazon is prioritizing their devices with screens.

It's not limited. Will be on all but the first gen devices.

Saying that, it's vapourware. No one has got it, even the big tech reviewers. AI is a buzz term which is good for boosting stock, especially with such a tantalising demo as Amazon put on however, until it is in people's homes, it's not real. Just look at the hot water Apple got itself in with its own AI attempt.

TLDR: It'll be on amazon devices without screens, be prepared to wait.

I thought it was gunna launch on screens first and then will go to most other devices? At least that's from what I read.

Who knows. It's not even launched on screens yet. I have heard conflicting reports and, considering it's already a month overdue, I'm not holding much stock in what they've said.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very excited about it, it could be cool. I do think it was a rather scavenger move by amazon though after apple's stumble with AI... At least, I think that was the timeline. Apple fails, look what we can do, rushed out. It wasn't even an open demonstration.

Amazon, with its reach, really has a huge chance to mop up here. I was in the prime app the other day and saw all the subscriptions they have in there. If they could get BBC and Nw TV, the version of sky which shows HBO on there too, it would be its own walled garden with a far grater reach and scope than apple, especially in the knowing what you want to buy before you do. Who knows.

Sorry, I got off track.

Like with any of this AI hype, I'm not going to hold my breath that it will be released in the next few months, let alone being released on the specific devices they have said.

Have it on my second generation device, and echo dot. The one that looks like a baseball. Is OK nothing to write home about it. Miss the old alexa voice.

Did do not like her, want my old lady back.

I finally got access to Alexa Plus a little over a week ago. It ended up being a bit of a saga, but the details aren't important. Anyway, I think it's phenomenal. Admittedly, my needs are fairly simple: I just have my morning alarm and a few daily reminders. The new voices sound great to me. They are much clearer and easier to hear. There are 8 new voices: 4 feminine and 4 masculine. I have 6 echo dots in my apartment: 3 second generation dots which are all hooked up to pairs of Bose Media Mates speakers, and 3 5th generation dots because of their built-in temperature sensers. My 3 second generation dots all have the wake word Alexa and are using feminine voice 3, and my 3 fifth generation dots have the wake word of Ziggy and are using masculine voice 2. Of course, there are a few quirks here and there, but I often experienced frustration with the original Alexa, so things really haven't changed. The few skills I use are working fine for the most part, although Puzzle of the Day, which has always been a bit quirky in my experience, does seem a bit flakier than it already was. It's a bummer that I had to wait 4 months to get early access, but now that I finally have it, I'd say that at least for my specific situation, it was well worth the wait.

one thing I was thinking about is how the new voices are at reading kindle books? I know with legacy alexa, or whatever they call it, you can ask it to pick up your current book, however, the audio quality isn't great. I'm hoping this is one of the improvements with alexa plus. Kindle seems a great use of more advanced TTS.

I'm really hoping this will change sooner rather than later, but at the moment, Alexa Plus can't read Kindle books aloud. It's the only thing I tried that didn't work, bu t since Alexa Plus is still very much in the early access/beta I am really hoping this will change at some point. The voices I'm using would both sound great reading Kindle books. It might even be enough to trick my brain into thinking I'm listening to human narration.

Oh. I just want to point out that Alexa plus isn’t even released in the UK yet. I am so ashamed with Amazon about how they market their new AI, and they even said that it will be rolling out two of the countries overtime, and five months later they still haven’t released it to the UK. I want AI on my Amazon echo show 10. And no I do not want to use those skills that have in the AI capabilities with an API, application programming interface, which is essentially a thing where it communicates to a piece of software to get information, Such as those AI things on the App Store like character AI, because that has to use ChatGPT for responses. So Amazon, please give us Alexa plus.

I think all these companies are simply riding the hype. As they are all US companies it makes sense, to please investors etc, that it rolls out there first. Hopefully, when it does get here, a lot of the bugs have been ironed out.

Hi guys, I have a strange question, I guess. So, lately I’ve been using the Alexa app on my phone — I’m not on Alexa plus or anything — but as I saw this thread pop up again, I’m reminded of a problem I started having a couple days ago, and I’m not sure if I’m the only one.
The thing is, whenever I’m reading a book with the Alexa app on my phone, for whatever reason, I’m not able to interrupt her in the middle of the book to tell her to skip backwards, go forward, play, or stop. I don’t know why Amazon hasn’t implemented the magic tap here so we can start and stop Alexa while she’s reading — double tapping with two fingers — but I digress. Whenever I give her a command to start reading a book from my kindle library, it works perfectly. However, even though the microphone is turned on, whenever I try to give her a command in the middle of the book, to pause, for example, it doesn't work. Very strange. The commands don't register at all. It shows on the screen that the microphone is working, but she keeps reading, almost as if she's not able to hear the command. This feature used to work before, but I'm not sure what's happening.
I used to be able to type to Alexa, and for whatever reason, ever since I implemented the microphone, I’m not seeing this option anymore. I’m not sure what’s going on. Also, regarding the upgraded Alexa voice — are we going to get that on the Alexa app or not? If anyone knows the answer to these questions — preferably the first one about why Alexa’s acting weird — because I’m not sure if it’s a bug or something else, please let me know.

OK, this is gonna be a silly question, but are you saying, "Alexa", first before you say something like Paws, or Paws book, or go back 10 minutes, or go to next chapter, etc.?
Also, we can still type to Alexa, but they have recently updated the app, so it's weird now. Basically, you have to tap your screen once with four fingers near the bottom, to get voice over to jump to the bottom of the screen, you will land on a, "speak to Alexa", button. If you swipe one time to the left, you will land on a, "Message Alexa", button.
Double tap this to type away. Fair warning, now as you type out something, VoiceOver will announce X number of suggestions as you're typing.
For example, you may type something like, "play my Kindle book", and by the time you have typed the word Kindle, you'll get a VoiceOver message stating something like, "6 suggestions".

One more thing, you can pause Kindle reading your book by either accessing the player controls from your lock screen, or from control center. It is a little buggy, but it does work.
Mostly ...

HTH. :-)

While using the Alexa app on your iPhone, it might be good to double tap the screen with three fingers to temporarily mute voiceover speech, before you give any voice commands to Alexa. Sometimes Alexa will hear VoiceOver, and then things just get a little weird.

Just a quick note to say thank you to Kyler G for the tip about using the word "Skill" when telling Alexa+ to use skills. This worked like a charm!

I’ve always been saying “Alexa” before giving a command. and I’ve turned off speech, but the only thing that seems to work is double tapping the microphone and then giving the command. And even then, more times than not, she ends up saying something like, “Sorry, that isn’t supported right now,” or “I can’t execute that,” or something along those lines.

It usually takes me asking two or three times before she finally gets it right. I don’t know. Even on actual Alexa devices — like the one we have here — my family has to repeat their commands two or three times. Loudly. I’m used to it at this point. Thanks — I got the typing feature to work again, so that’s good. And I’m also going to start using the Control Center trick to pause playback — totally forgot about this. It's all good now.

Cool!
Just a quick recap, these are the commands I know of that work with Alexa, app or device alike.
As always, remember to say "Alexa" before each of these, unless you are typing them out:
• Play my Kindle book.
• Play Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on Kindle.
• Go Forward 30 seconds (or x minutes, or x hours).
• Go Back 30 seconds (or x minutes, or x hours).
• Go to Next Chapter.
• Go to Previous Chapter.
• Pause book.
• Continue book or Continue my Kindle Book.
• Read faster.
• Read slower.

I have yet to figure out how to jump to a specific chapter, i.e. Chapter 4, or how to bookmark a place in a currently running book.

Anyway HTH. 😀

Did I heard it can play them?

All right, so I have another question regarding Alexa. Whenever I’m reading Kindle books with Alexa on my phone, if I get a message, Alexa never gets interrupted to let me know that there’s a message. My phone isn’t on mute, but even if it were, shouldn’t I at least feel the vibration? How do I stop this from happening? Because when I’m listening to a book with Alexa, I’m basically missing out on important notifications. Whenever I receive a phone call, my phone rings, so that's perfectly fine, but if it's a text message? Or a message of any kind, messenger, WhatsApp, iMessage? Nothing happens.

Another issue I’m having is with the Kindle text-to-speech feature. For some reason, the assisted reader has been turned off on my device. I did manage to enable it again for books, but now I’m not sure how to change the pitch of the voice. I was able to adjust the speed back to 2x, but the pitch is low. I’m not sure what’s happening here. Speak Screen on the iPhone works well, and the pitch is fine. Even though I'm using the same voice on the Kindle app, the pitch is messed up over there for some strange reason. If anyone knows the answers to these questions, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

The pitch with the Kindle Assistive Reader may be a Kindle bug. As for not receiving notification alerts, I am not exactly sure. I get them on my device while playing a book. Do you have Focus/Do Not Disturb enabled?
Or do you have an activity that maybe disable alerts while you are reading?

I don’t typically use the Focus mode on my phone, and as far as I know, I’ve never used any activities before. Ever since I downloaded the Alexa app, I’ve never gotten message notifications—no text updates or anything like that. Besides, why would I get the phone calls, but not the text messages? Strange. I’m definitely not sure what’s happening here.

I'm asking because, I have an iPhone SE 2022, and I'm fairly certain I still get all of my notifications on my device while playing a book through the Alexa app. Unless I turn focus mode on, or mute the ringer. When I do the latter, I also tend to mute VoiceOver speech as well, just so that I won't be bothered while listening to a book.

Disregard what I said above. It turns out that, while I do in fact receive text messages and notifications while listening to a book on the Alexa app, via the Kindle Assistive Reader, the alert tones do not play, VoiceOver still announces messages and announces that I have a new notification vocally.
It looks like Alexa takes over the alert tone function while it is the active application, possibly for its own notifications such as weather alerts, etc.

HTH.

Can you get it to play on the echo device?

I think Kyler said you can, you have to install a skill called "My Talking Books" by National Library Services, in order for it to work, as I understand it.

I just link my phone to the echo, it play my bard mobile.

Fair enough.

Is there a way to stop Alexa from adding books to my library? Sometimes when I ask her to read a title from my library, she hears something completely unrelated. Unfortunately, if that book is free and part of Audible or Kindle Unlimited, it automatically gets added to my library, which means I have to go in and remove it. Is there any way to adjust the permission settings so she can’t add books to my library at all? I’m glad I don’t have purchasing permissions enabled—otherwise, she probably would’ve bought books I didn’t even want.