Best Alexa Skills to Activate on Amazon Echo
List of the Best Alexa Skills to activate on your Amazon Echo to add functions to the voice assistant
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| What is The Best Alexa Skills to Activate on Amazon Echo ©navigaweb |
The big advantage of Amazon Alexa is represented by the Skills, which are a bit like applications on a smartphone. Since anyone can create new skills for Alexa and it’s not too difficult to do it, they have created a real store of skills to add, for free, to your Amazon Echo, for the most diverse functions.
In the list of Skills, the most popular and installed are certainly those for listening to music, for hearing news, and for controlling smart devices such as lights and electrical sockets. However, there are also many other skills, to listen to meditation sounds, doing gymnastics, playing, listening to children’s fairy tales, and much more.
It is therefore time to make a list of the best Alexa skills the ones that are worth activating, installing, and trying because they are useful, giving new functions and abilities to the Echo speaker, covering a wide range of uses.
NOTE: To Install a Skill on Echo you can search for it on the Alexa smartphone app or, more easily, open the Alexa Skill site on the PC, log into the same Amazon account used on the Echo, and then, when choosing a skill, press the yellow activation button. Automatically, this will be activated on your Echo and you can tell Alexa “Open skill-name” or “Ask name-skill blablabla“.
Note that it is also possible to easily create new skills with questions with answers for Alexa free and easy for everyone, thanks to the Blueprints site.
1) Skill to read the news of the day
Some Skills are added instead to the Daily Summary, that is to the news that you listen to by asking Alexa “tell me today’s news“. From the Alexa App on Android or iPhone, you have to go to Settings and then on Daily summary where you can sort the news sources (in order to decide which ones are listened to first) and then also activate or deactivate them as and when you want. From this screen you can also add other news sources including, the best for me, is that of TGCom24, very fast and complete. Those who have the Echo Show can also see the news headlines on the screen.
Among the news can also be added the weather skill that must always be installed.
BONUS: You can also add the Alexa daily summary skill of Navigaweb.netto have the titles of the latest published articles read (it’s very simple, but thanks if you install it).
2) Look up on Wikipedia
With the Skill SearchWiki, it is possible to search on Wikipedia so that you can ask for information on anything, with data taken directly from the Wikipedia site.
3) Find Phone
This is really a useful feature to add to your Amazon Echo, which allows you to know, on request, where the phone is by making it ring. To configure this skill, you must first activate Find Phone on Alexa, then install the app Phone Finder for Alexa on the Android smartphone and follow the wizard written on the Skill description page.
4) Remaining credit and gig left on the mobile
Some mobile phone operators have released Alexa skills so that you can ask the voice assistant for information on remaining credit, promotions, and other data on the telephone subscription. Among the skills of this type, there are Tobi of Vodafone then also TIM And Fastweb
5) Take notes
With skill Take notes you can dictate notes to Alexa to write. Later you can also add other notes and have what has been written reread. In the end, it is possible to receive via email all the written notes. It works well and is very useful
6) Phone book
Although not perfect, the skill of phone book is perhaps the only one available at the moment that allows you to search for the telephone number of someone, of shops or of offices on White Pages.
7) Look up the meaning of words
The skill of the Treccani vocabulary is the best for knowing the meaning of words.
8) Look for recipes to cook
The skill of Yellow Saffron allows you to search for recipes, know ingredients, and be guided to prepare any dish.
9) Listen to bedtime stories
There are numerous skills for listening to children’s bedtime stories, one of the best in Italian is the Storyteller.
10) Learn English
Among the Alexa skills to learn and perfect English listening and pronunciation is that of Oxfordofficial, with several episodes and readings to listen to.
11) Horoscope
who wants to know how it will go today, can have Alexa tell the horoscope by installing a skill like that of Paolo Fox
12) What they do on TV today
Their TV Guide is one of the most useful skills to have on Alexa, to know what they are doing on TV at all times.
13) Relaxing sounds
A really rich Alexa skill category is that of relaxing sounds or to sleep, including piano sounds, Tibetan bells, nature sounds, and much more.
14) Streaming radio
Virtually all national and even local radios have a skill that allows you to listen to broadcasts live. Looking for the radio skill you can choose which one to add and then access listening from the Amazon Echo. There are Radio Deejay, 105, Kiss Kiss, RDS, Virgin Radio, RTL 102.5, RadioRai, and many others.
You can also activate the TuneIn skill, to have all the radios in the world at your fingertips. TuneIn is activated from the Alexa app, by going to Settings> Music.
15) Soccer results
You can follow the matches of the Italian football championship using the Skill Football league (although unfortunately, he does not warn when a team scores).
16) How to dress today
You can ask Alexa for advice on what to wear today to go out with the skill Dress assistant who responds by checking the weather in their city.
17) Workouts at home
You can ask Alexa to give us a training program to follow with the skill Quick workout in 7 minutes (there are others to try too)
18) Alexa games
There are so many you play on Alexa, most of which are made up of questions to be answered, to be played alone or with friends. We can scroll through a list of games on This Page and find skills like Clem Quiz, True or False, Question of the Day, Trivial Pursuit, Escape Room, Akinator the genius.
Finally, there are specific skills that can be activated from the Alexa App, by going to Settings. Among these we have:
– Add TVs to control (such as Fire TV or Sony Android TV).
– Add streaming music services like Spotify or Apple Music
– Personalize sports news
– Add a Skype account to make phone calls (remember that with Alexa you can call Amazon users for free)
Other skills then allow you to manage home automation, sockets, lights, heating and cooling systems, robot vacuum cleaners, and so on. Depending on the brand, you will have to activate the skill designed for managing that particular device.
For other features, you can also use the online service IFTTT with Alexa (see here how to use IFTTT).