Over the past few years, Amazon has deliveredsome of the first and favorite Smart Home devices. Alexa is now a householdname when it comes to voice assistants, and many people around the world wantto get their hands on their devices. They’re great tools to help manage yourhome and interact with your appliances—and other household members.
When it comes to managing these devices, it’simportant to know how to manage the users who can access them. How do youchange the owner of your Alexa devices? Inorder to change the owner of Alexa devices, you first have to deregister thedevice from the original Owner’s Amazon account.
Read on to learn more about some of the mostpopular Amazon Alexa devices and how you can manage the Owner account and otherusers in your Amazon Household.
Changingthe Owner of Alexa Devices
If you decide to return, sell, or give away yourdevice, you’ll need to remove your Amazon account to prepare for a new owner.This will remove your current data and settings, so the new owner can startover to manage their own settings. Toallow a new Owner to take over the device, you must first deregister the devicefrom your account.
The Reverb app lets you chat with Alexa, helping to answer questions, provide information, and tap into other Alexa skills. Download the version of the app for your mobile device from Apple's App. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. Alexa on a PC is unable to make a phone call or send a text message itself or through the Alexa app. Alexa on an Acer Spin 5 can play music or news from Amazon Music, SiriusXM, and iHeart Radio. While using your voice to create lists is cool and all, you’ll get the most functionality if you just use the Alexa app. To get started, open up the app and tap on the menu button in the top-left corner of the screen. From there, tap on “Lists”. Next, tap on “Create List” at the top.
To deregister a device from your Amazonaccount, follow these steps in the Alexa app:
- Tap Settings on the left-hand side.
- Click on the name of the device you wish to deregister.
- Tap Deregister and Confirm.
Some Alexa devices do not have the option to deregister in the Alexa app. In these cases, you’ll have to visit the Amazon website on your web browser to make the changes.
- Under the Accounts & Lists menu, select Manage Your Content & Devices.
- Select Your Devices.
- To the left of each device, you should see an ellipses (…).
- Find the device you wish to deregister and Tap on the three dots.
- Click Deregister, then select again to confirm.
Interested in how to add Alexa to your car? Check out our post here to find out more.
Creating Your Amazon Household
If you have a family where multiple peoplewill be accessing and using your Alexa devices, you may want to set up anAmazon Household. This allows you to act as Owner and choose Household memberswho can also browse and utilize your devices.
Whenyou create your Amazon Household and invite other users, you can share content,manage certain account features, and access customized information oncompatible Alexa devices. You can create a Householdin the Alexa app or on your computer by selecting Manage Your Household in yourSettings.
To add a person to your Amazon Household, heor she must be present with you. Then, follow these steps in the Alexa app:
- Select Settings on the menu.
- Tap Alexa Account and then select Amazon Household.
- Follow the on-screen instructions to add a new member.
It’s important to remember that when you addan adult to your Amazon Household, you authorize that he or she can use thepayment method associated with your account. For added security, you can chooseto require a confirmation code for voice purchases in the Alexa app.
Also, on Echo devices with a screen, you authorize other adult users in your Household to access and view your Prime Photos. On the Echo Look (Note: discontinuing as of July 2020), only you can see and delete the photos in your account. Alexa will identify which account is active when you ask her to take a picture.
How do you change Alexa’s name, voice, or accent? Jump over to our post here to learn more.
If another adult is added to your AmazonHousehold, he or she can link their calendar to Alexa. You will be able to hearevents from all linked calendars when you ask Alexa about your upcoming events.
Switching to Another Profile
Onceyou finish setting up your Amazon Household, you can switch between adult userson compatible Alexa devices. To do so, all you have to do is tell Alexa to“Switch accounts.” If you ever need to check whichaccount you’re currently using, you can ask Alexa, “Which account is this?” andshe will let you know who is currently logged on and active.
When you’re browsing in a content library inthe Alexa app, use the drop-down menu to navigate between user libraries.
Removing an Adult from Your AmazonHousehold
Alexa App For Mac Desktop
When people move out of your home, or if youno longer wish them to have access to your devices, you can remove a user fromyour Household.
If you want to remove a member from yourAmazon Household, the process is also pretty simple. Follow these steps in theAlexa app:
- Start by visiting your Household settings.
- Select Remove next to the user you’d like to remove.
- If you are removing your own account, Select Leave.
Be careful when removing users from yourAmazon Household. It’s important to note that once you remove an adult fromyour Household, you cannot add either user account to another Household for 180days. If you remove an account by accident, it’s recommended that you contactAmazon Customer Service to add the user account back to your Household.
Exploring Some of Our Favorite Alexa Devices
Alexa is Amazon’s voice assistant that you canaccess through Alexa smart speakers and displays. You can wake the device bysimply saying, “Alexa.” Then, you can tell her to perform various tasks likesetting an alarm, performing an online search, checking the weather, and more.Recently, one of the most common commands is having Alexa control your otherSmart Home devices like a video doorbell or smart lock.
Over the past few years, Amazon has releasedmany popular Smart Home devices that are all compatible with Alexa. Here aresome of our favorites:
Manage Alexa On Pc
- The Amazon Echo Dot is an Alexa speaker that’s currently in its third generation. The improved design includes better sound than previous models at a pretty affordable price.
- The Amazon Echo Show is a smart display with a built-in Alexa speaker. It’s compatible with Alexa-enabled security cameras like your Smart doorbell.
- The Ring Peephole Camera is a smart doorbell that attaches to your front door’s traditional peephole.
- The August Smart Lock allows you to remotely lock and unlock your door. It also gives you status updates for when your door is opened and closed.
- The Amazon Fire TV Stickallows you to scroll through television programs and select things to watch with your voice.
- Simpli Safe is a do-it-yourself home security system. It works with Alexa, so you can arm and manage the system with voice commands.
Get Smart with Other AmazonAlexa-compatible Devices
Amazon is pretty much everyone’s favoriteonline shopping platform. And they’re arguably one of the best manufacturers ofSmart Home products. They allow you to manage many different aspects of yourhome and stay connected to your house while you’re away.
When you’re entering into the world of SmartHome technology, the Amazon Alexa devices are a great place to start. That way,you can simply continue your journey by adding devices that are compatible withAlexa to fully integrate your appliances and devices.
Whatever happened to the days of Alexa just being known as a black cylindrical speaker? Since the introduction of the first Echo in fall 2014, Amazon’s AI assistant has been embedded in a number of places, including car infotainment systems, Alexa smartphone apps, wireless headphones, Echo Show and Fire tablets, Fire TV Cube for TV control, the Echo Look with an AI-powered fashion assistant, and, in recent weeks, personal computers.
Select computers from HP, Acer, and others now make Alexa available to work seamlessly alongside Microsoft’s Cortana well ahead of the Alexa-Cortana partnership for Echo speakers and Windows 10 devices, a project that still has no launch date.
Among the many surfaces that can be used to talk to Alexa today, there are differences both glaring and subtle. Alexa in wireless earbuds, for example, cannot do things like set timers or send messages, and the Echo Show can display visuals when you ask a question.
Alexa in personal computers comes with a set of advantages — like the ability to talk with Alexa hands-free — and drawbacks.
Here’s a closer look at what Alexa can and cannot do on an Acer Spin 5, the first laptop with Alexa inside, made available in June.
Manage Alexa On Mac Keyboard
What Alexa can do on a PC
Just like wireless earbuds or smart speakers, Alexa on a personal computer can control smart home devices. As of May, Amazon’s Alexa can control more than 12,000 devices from 2,000 manufacturers.
Alexa in the Acer Spin 5 is also able to speak with more than 40,000 Alexa skills to let you play games like Jeopardy! or the Spongebob Challenge, or hear bedtime stories.
And just like the AI assistant is able to do in other devices, Alexa on a PC can tell jokes, show personality, and search Wikipedia for answers to your factual questions about the world.
Alexa on Acer Spin 5 is also able to achieve the imperative task of being able to respond to hands-free voice commands, utilizing four microphones to pick up the sound of your voice from across the room.
Alexa on a PC can show your list of reminders and your shopping list, and that can be pretty handy — but you cannot edit the list with a tap on the screen or click of the mouse. Instead, any edits must be made in the Alexa app.
By contrast, with the Echo Show, you can scroll through your lists to remove to-do items or tap to edit an item on the list.
The limitations of visual cards
The most common thing people do every day with a smart speaker is check the weather. At launch, the Acer Spin 5 can provide five-day forecasts with high and low temperatures on a single visual card.
Another common thing done with an assistant is check the calendar. Here again the Spin 5 can provide results — but for a day, not a more extended period of time.
Ask “What’s on my calendar?” and you can see your next calendar event, but you can’t scroll through your schedule for the days and weeks ahead, as you can do with the Echo Show or Fire 10 tablets with Show Mode.
In general, visual cards on a device like Echo Show, or even the cards you can see when using an Alexa app on a smartphone, are much richer than those served up by Alexa on a PC.
This is in part due to the simpler, less illustrative user interface for Alexa on PC, but also because all the cards generated by Alexa and live in the stream are static. You are shown a stream of cards related to your activity, but you can’t go back and tap or re-engage with them. You have to ask the question again.
Other things you can do:
- Set keyboard shortcuts so you can press Ctrl+Shift+A to wake up Alexa
- Play music or listen to the news and toggle through songs or podcasts with a mouse click or screen tap
- Activity history between devices syncs on the Alexa app so you can keep track of what you’ve been doing, whether you were talking to a speaker or your PC
An Amazon spokesperson declined to discuss how Alexa on PCs may evolve over time or what future iterations might look like, but they said the AI assistant on personal computers was designed to ensure access to important productivity tools such as reminders, lists, calendars, and skills.
“At this time, there are some features that vary between Show Mode and Alexa on PCs like the ability to view videos,” the spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.
Shopping
This is interesting. Ask to order virtually anything and the PC assistant will read you each item’s title and give you options to buy, add to list, or scroll through a carousel of similar items to purchase. This is the only use case I came across that gives this sort of option.
Speaking to Alexa may be different if you’re using a PC, smart speaker, earbuds, or Echo Look fashion assistant, but unlike variations with other features, it seems you can shop anywhere you can speak to Alexa.
Consumers’ willingness to shop with their voice may be in question today, but the wide availability of voice shopping comes as no surprise for a company whose purpose is to help people shop, especially amid the ecommerce battle ramping up now, with Amazon on one side and Google Assistant and retailers like Walmart and Home Depot on the other.
What Alexa cannot do on a PC
Alexa on a PC is unable to make a phone call or send a text message itself or through the Alexa app.
Alexa on an Acer Spin 5 can play music or news from Amazon Music, SiriusXM, and iHeart Radio, but not Spotify or Pandora. As Amazon continues to push its Music app to consumers, it’s probably no mistake that the two most popular music streaming services in the United States were excluded from Alexa on a PC.
You get a similarly limited experience with headphones and earbuds from the mobile accessories kit.
Respond to typed commands
Once scarce among assistants from big tech companies, typing a command is now standard, available on Google Assistant and Siri on mobile devices and Cortana on Windows 10 PCs — but not Alexa.
The ability to type a command is important for moments when you want to complete an action but don’t want to say it out loud to get it done, such as when you’re in a meeting or you just want to maintain some privacy.
![Manage alexa on mac keyboard Manage alexa on mac keyboard](https://dl1.cbsistatic.com/i/2017/10/05/f0074861-f898-4d2a-a13e-9217dfcd4fce/f46bd9e70924ed249000f6482f49aa6b/imgingest-2318775294136122920.png)
Launch apps or visual skills
Alexa can serve up skills like most any other device connected with the AI assistant, but you can’t access visual Alexa skills on a computer yet to, for example, give you the iconic blue screen when playing Jeopardy! as you can when you play on an Echo Show. Alexa on PC is also unable to launch PC apps, so don’t expect to open apps or games like you can with Cortana.
Act as a home intercom
Alexa on a PC is also unable to make announcements to Echo speakers. Announcements are one-way voice messages you can send to Echo devices in your home to tell everyone dinner is ready or encourage your kid to get ready for school. The purpose of announcements is to act similar to a home intercom.
Save your work
The genius of conversational computing is that it removes the need to learn how to use a graphic user interface to carry out computing tasks. Instead of navigation, you just talk.
To make this practical, however, requires giving people a way to go back to what they were doing earlier, because in the real world people tend to get interrupted or distracted.
Should you listen to a song with Spin 5 and press pause, for 10 to 15 seconds it’ll show the music at the bottom of the app window, but after a while it disappears and you’re left with no way to return to that paused song. Take pic of screen mac.
Alexa on a PC gives you a vertical interface of cards you can peruse but no way to return to shopping, or adding an event to your calendar, or anything else you were doing. You just have to start over.
This same problem is encountered with Echo Show and Google Assistant on the visual Lenovo Smart Display. In each instance, you can begin a journey of sorts with voice, start down a road to complete a task, but lose your place if you get distracted by other duties.
Other key missing features:
- With the Spin 5, if you have an Echo speaker at home, you’re going to want to use another wake word for your computer or use the keyboard shortcut, because if you say “Alexa, what’s in the news?” or another command within distance of either device, flash briefings and podcasts will run on both your computer and your speaker.
- Prime Photos access is not supported on the PC, so you cannot view your photos.
- There is no full-screen deployment of Alexa with the Spin 5, as all interaction is relegated to a fixed-width app window. That’s unfortunate since the Spin 5 offers a versatile design. In addition to the traditional notebook look, the Spin 5 can bend the keyboard behind the 13.3-inch HD display or stand in an A shape. Combine this with forward-facing speakers and the Spin 5 makes a great computer for binge-watching shows and the like, but Alexa fails to take advantage of this. By contrast, Cortana is able to use the entire screen to display cards when answering questions about your schedule or other queries.
Conclusion
Unmentioned for the most part thus far is how Cortana compares to Alexa on a PC because there’s no real comparison to make. Cortana on a PC is still miles ahead. Without the need to unlock the device, Cortana can go full-screen, show you your reminders and your calendar, answer factual questions, or begin image or video searches.
This takes full advantage of the Acer Spin 5’s screen and ability to fold in an A-shape for a touch display experience, and things get even more impressive if you begin to use a Cortana-enabled speaker like the Harman Kardon Invoke.
Visual experiences with assistants like Cortana and Alexa and changing fast, but with Alexa on a PC today there’s no Tap to Alexa or Show Mode for better a visual experience; few advanced assistant features; and a painfully simple user interface that can’t take advantage of the full screen.
In a word, the first iteration of Alexa in a PC is basic.
If you’re mainly interested in the most common Alexa use cases — to answer questions, control smart home devices, shuffle Beastie Boys songs, and get the weather — then you might like the Spin 5. Office for mac not working. But if you’re looking to buy this computer because you’re already part of the Alexa world and want an Alexa experience in a visual environment or full control of your computer, the Acer Spin 5 will be disappointing to you.
However, the Acer Spin 5 is a versatile 13.3-inch notebook with an HD touch display worth checking out on its own merits, especially if you like Cortana and are willing to wait for Alexa to get better.
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