Dr. Dot, the daily five minute skill devotion, where everyone can simply dot it about Alexa. Hello you, Dr. Dot listeners.
This is David Ward from Across the Pond, demoing basically what I think is very likely a brand new feature. It's so new, there's no documentation on it practically at all. And so I hesitate to say it's worldwide available, it's probably US centric feature right now, but hopefully we'll be coming around the world. But like I said, there's no documentation about it quite so far yet, and so maybe we'll have to keep an eye on the A-Lady blog to see what it says about this feature when it's finally we get some documentation.
So it's the ability to get a text message on your phone connected with reminders that you've set on your Amazon. Echo, we'll talk about why that's beneficial here in a second, but first off, like usual, we want to demonstrate it right away. So let's give this a chance, Alexa, create a reminder. What's the reminder for?
Hey, Silly, don't forget your having cheeseburgers with your sister for lunch. When should I remind you? Five seconds. Okay, I'll remind you in five seconds.
As you can imagine, I've left the office or I'm walking around the campus, I'm not near my Echo in the classroom, and I can still get my reminders via a text message in here. We'll just hear it in just a second. Oh, there you go. For you UK listeners, you might recognize the TARDIS sound effect, and we'll talk about that here in just a second, but let me ask my phone to read my text message.
Read my text message. You have new messages in 33 conversations. First, my Echo said reminder from Alexa. Hey, Silly, you're having cheeseburgers with your sister.
Would you like to reply? Pretty cool, pretty cool. So there you go. I got it as a text message on my phone.
Now, what might this might bring to you that you didn't have access to before? Because if you had a smartphone with the A-Lady app on it, you did have the capacity to get notifications. So that's around for a while, and particularly notifications connected with reminders. Well, this is unique in the fact that you don't have to have a smartphone.
So you may have a family member. You may be in a caregiver situation. You may be a parent with young children that don't have smartphones, but maybe you got them kind of like a little feature phone. This may be an ability to get those individuals hooked in with reminders that are set on the Echo as well.
So just kind of cool. The other added benefit, which you might have noticed, is that I had a TARDIS sound effect, right? Go off as a text message notification on my iPhone. So how did I do that?
Well, see, that's one of the disadvantages of using the notification in the A-Lady app, is you're kind of locked into whatever that generic ding tone is. So it may blend into the background of all the other notifications you're getting throughout the day. So this is kind of neat in that I can set up the text messaging notification instead for reminders. And then when I get that first message, or even when you flick the button on, you get it, I can save that contact and assign a custom text tone to that contact.
And I named it My Echo, which you might have heard. And then I assigned a custom text tone, which was the TARDIS sound effect. So there you go. So that's kind of a real handy way to do it.
So how do we turn this feature on? Now, incidentally, when I was just setting reminders a week or so ago, my Echo particularly propped at me and said, hey, would you like to turn on text message notifications for your reminders? And I'm like, what? You can do that?
So I said, yes. And so you may just, by happenstance, get asked your Echo to do it. But other than that, I don't know if any verbal way to invoke it at this moment. So what you would need to do is open your A-Lady app, tap on the More button in the bottom right corner, which I think has three dots on it.
That will slide out your menu. And then you're going to go down to Settings, tap on Settings. This is a global setting, so it affects all the echoes on your account. You're going to scroll down this long, long list under Settings, down to Reminders, which is very close to, I believe, calendars and maybe to-do list.
You'll tap on Reminders. And in the next page, you have the ability to turn off notifications on and off through the A-Lady app. And then immediately below that is this brand new feature, the ability to get text messages connected with reminders. So you would tap that.
And it would take you to the next page to confirm how it works, because data rates and things and text messaging plans may vary. It may cost you something, whatever. It gives you the kind of those blurbs. And then you can toggle that feature on.
Now, Middly, on that same page, you have the ability to change the phone number that it's using for text messaging. That's associated with your current profile and account. So that may be useful if, like, for example, you had a minor kid who had a feature phone, you could go in there and maybe change that phone number. So you need to still kind of neat ideas about how you may use this.
And I'll let you just go hog-wild with that. But hopefully a new feature that will be coming around the world soon, and hopefully we'll get some more documentation about it. Well, that's it for me. I'm David Ward with the New Vision program at Goodwill.
You're welcome to look up more about me at GoodwillValleys.com slash New Vision. But for now, we thank you for listening. Be back, comments, demos, the. podcast at Gmail.com.
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