Hi all,
Does anyone in the US have access to Alexa Plus yet? I've been keeping track of the news still, but the whole thing is starting to feel like a gigantic smart display advertisement.
I'm super excited to try out the new voices and conversational capabilities; just waiting for Amazon to stop prioritizing their smart displays.
Comments
Disabling Alexa Plus
So you can't just ask it to disable alexa plus? I thought it was supposed to be easier to dip in and out of it? Can you change language, then go straight back to the original one or would that enable it again?
Do you lose anything by doing this? (E.g. do any skills disappear or do you lose saved data?)
Some answers
In my experience, no you cannot just ask it to go away. I even went through my Amazon account online, and purposefully disabled Alexa plus from my account. That was pointless, because it just came back on its own. As far as I can tell, you don't lose anything, save data or otherwise, by switching languages. Obviously, just make sure you are comfortable with the language you switched to.
I know how you folks can be across the pond, with your perfect Engrish. (Sorry, not sorry)
Oh, and if you switch to a different language, then switch back, Alexa plus comes back. Like a bad rash.
The pains of getting rid of it
I had somehow got the impression it was easy to go between the two versions. Basically if I switch to Plus and the daily connection stops working then I'll be having to put up with an aussie accent for a while I guess.
Is it an account level switch? So it affects all your speakers? You can't enable it on one but not another? I presume my Sonos speakers that don't support it would still work with the old version so I suppose I would have that.
Alexa plus is account specific, however...
Toggling Alexa plus is device specific. Personally, I wouldn't mind Alexa plus, except that I enjoy listening to Kindle books on my Alexa devices/application. Plus, however, does not yet support this feature. So until it does, to help with Alexa plus.
You can disable it on devices.
On a device, e.g. Echo, you can switch in and out of it. For some reason the iOS app doesn't support that. If you tell it to disable it, it says something like it can't find that in your account.
Re: You can disable it on devices.
And does it stay disabled once you do this, or does it come back?
It stays disabled.
The one place I've noticed it sort of sticking around is in a game, there's like one tiny part where the voice changes. In case anybody's really curious it's Knight manager, when you go to the blacksmith and pick a thing to upgrade, the voice that asks you if you want to do the upgrade is the new Alexa Plus voice. No idea why. It doesn't happen anywhere else, that I've noticed.
But yeah, other than that, if you disable it, it stays disabled. At least, it hasn't come back in like, maybe a month? I'm guessing, I don't know exactly when we tried it. Whenever the reports came out that it was automatically switching, ours hadn't yet so I figured if it was going to anyway, we may as well switch it.
If you can tell me how to get it to read a Kindle book I can test that for you if you want. I've never used it to do that, but I think I bought a Kindle book or two ages ago.
Reading a Kindle book
Just say something like, "Alexa, read (title of book) (on Kindle".
Or if you have already loaded a book like this and are going back to it:
"Alexa, read my book on Kindle".
This also works for Audible books, just replace Kindle in my phrases above, with Audible.