You dot to dot. With 85 minutes, you'll demonstrate. For everyone who's simply dotty about Alexa. Hello, you dot to dot listeners.
This is David Ward from Across the Pond, bringing you a new feature on Amazon Echo, especially here in the United States, but hopefully available in other localities. And if not there yet, wherever you are at, hopefully coming to you soon. And it all centers around this very sound. Have you ever heard that sound before?
Well, you probably have, and you realized immediately what it was. It's the notification jingle on the Amazon Echo. So at times you may get that little jingle, and it's sometimes a little accompanied by a verbal notification, saying you've got packages getting delivered, or pizzas on its way, or whatever it's connected to. Maybe a weather alert, or something like that.
Now, the trick is, and the neat thing about the feature we're talking about today, is what if you aren't near your Echo at the time it does the jingle? Well, up until now, the only thing you could do is hope to come back in the room, glance over at your Echo, and see that on the traditional Echoes, there'd be a little yellow spinning light on top. That was a visual indicator that there was a notification. Or, if you had an Echo show with a screen on it, there'd be a similar kind of little visual indicator on it.
Maybe not quite as obvious, but there nonetheless. Well, this feature was originally designed, that we're discussing today, with a visual impaired community in mind, or even a totally blind community in mind. Me and Robin both have eye conditions that doesn't allow us to see those lights that well, or see them at all. So, this was made with us in mind.
But, in reality, I think this is great for everybody, anybody, really. Because if I'm down in the basement, and my Echo goes off upstairs, you know, with a notification, you know, I can come upstairs, but it may not be terribly obvious unless I'm really looking right at the thing. Maybe I'm doing other things. It may be something I want to know right away.
There's other things you can think about as well. Maybe like if you were en route from home to work, or work to home, and different things where a notification may have gone off, but you weren't readily near your Echo. So, that's why this new feature is called, When Nearby, or excuse me, Notify Me, When Nearby. I'll get the name right.
Notify, When Nearby. And the notion is, is that when you come into proximity of an Echo that's on your account again, and it knows that you missed that notification, it knows you weren't nearby, it gives you that notification in an audible way, so that you know that you missed something. Now, how does this feature work? Well, it draws on Bluetooth, location services, and also on voice ID.
It uses the three of those together to kind of correlate when you're in a room near your Echo. And how do we enable this feature? Unfortunately, there's no way for us to verbally demonstrate that today, because there's no verbal command you can do to enable it. But instead, you would need to do it on your phone, with your smartphone, with the A-Lady app.
So, what you would do is open your A-Lady app, and the bottom right corner tap on the More button. That will slide out a menu from the left, and you will then tap on Settings. Now, the cool thing that we're going to find right here is, we don't have to set this for each individual Echo. This is what we would call a global setting, so it applies to all the Echoes on your account, which is good for me.
I have an Echo at work and an Echo at home, both on my account. And so this way, it correlates all of those things at the same time. Now, on this page, like I said, you won't need to tap on the Echo, but you would scroll down and tap on Accessibility, because that is where this feature is nested under, that was originally designed with a visual impaired or totally blind in mind. So, you would tap on that feature, and then near the top, you're going to see this setting, name just what we said, notify when nearby, and you will toggle it on.
It will briefly take you through like a one or two page little tutorial, and it's mostly doing that to give you context for a pop-up that's going to come up on your phone. The pop-up is going to ask, does the A-Lady app have permission to have access to your location information? And so, the app is going to need to be able to net into those Bluetooth settings, and even possibly location or GPS settings, to help correlate when you are near your Echo, and when you're not near your Echo. And so, before that pop-up comes up, you do get a little bit of a tutorial in there, and it tells you also that Echoes, issued from 2019 forward, will have the ability to interact with this feature.
I'm not entirely sure why. I'm thinking probably because of Bluetooth things, low-energy Bluetooth and things like that, that might help with proximity detection of those forward, also probably the voice ID component probably as well. So, those Echoes moving forward will be able to interact with this feature. So, once you toggle it on, it will ask for that permission.
Now, on an iPhone, it would ask, always give my location information to the A-Lady, not just when the app is open. And I imagine on Android, you get a similar notification. And once you toggle those on, the idea is, is that when you're away, like I'm leaving home, and I'm coming to work, when I walk into the classroom, I have an Echo on my desk, it will correlate that information to know that I'm now nearby my Echo, and I can get the notification that I otherwise would have missed. So, there you go.
That is it for Notify Me When Nearby. I hope you enjoy the feature. Your mileage may vary. I haven't had an extensive experience with it, and I made the mistake of leaving my Echo and Do Not Disturb for about a week or so, so that might have hammered my ability to get those notifications.
But I definitely have noticed an increase in getting those chimes and different things when I'm at home. And I think it's mostly because I probably just walked in the door from work, or maybe I was doing laundry down the hallway, and I came into the home, and then I got the notification. So, my name again is David Ward for the New Vision program, and we thank you for listening. Feedback, comments, demos.
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