Alexa, Show Me the Best Amazon Echo Show Tips and Tricks

 

Alexa, Show Me the Best Amazon Echo Show Tips and Tricks

Amazon's Echo Show devices, which include touch screens in addition to their speakers, have their own special features. These tricks will help you make the most of Amazon's smart displays.



Most top-rated smart speakers can set timers, control smart home devices, and play music, among other things. But if you're a visual person, Amazon's Echo Show lineup adds an interactive touch screen to display photos, song details, or video calls.

Amazon has an Echo Show for every occasion, from the 10-inch version with a camera that can follow you around the room to the diminutive Echo Show 5. Updated versions of the Show 5 and the mid-size Show 8, plus a kid-specific Echo Show 5, arrive in early June.

New Echo Shows for 2021

Image: Amazon (Amazon.com)

Sound quality notwithstanding, an Echo Show offers some unique advantages over its audio-only counterparts, including video conferences with people who have their own Echo Show or the Alexa app.


Many of the tips below require the Alexa mobile app on your smartphone (snag it for iOS(Opens in a new window) or Android(Opens in a new window)). It's how you control a number of settings for Amazon Echo devices, whether they have a screen or not. (At the very least, you need access to the website(Opens in a new window).) Once your Echo Show is set up, read on for some tricks that make this touch-screen smart speaker such a treat.

Stop (or Start) the Background

To change the background imagery on your Echo Show, open the Alexa app, tap the hamburger menu in the lower right, and go to Settings > Device Settings. Find your Echo Show and tap Photo Display. Here, you can link the Echo Show to your phone's photos, Amazon Photos, or a Facebook account. You can also toggle on "Daily Memories" or "This Day" for highlights; manually pick only a handful of pics; or select just one pic. Say "Alexa, go to settings" (or swipe down from the top and tap Settings), then tap Home & Clock> Clock & Photo Display > Personal Photos > Background and check off the linked services you want to use. 

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Prep Your Silk Settings

Silk is the browser Amazon bundles on most Fire devices. (Amazon used to offer Firefox as an option, but the deal died in April.) So if you'll be browsing any websites, make sure Silk is set to do your bidding. Go to Settings > Device Options > Web Options > Browser > Browser Settings. Silk can scale web pages, save passwords, offer safe browsing from dangerous sites, and clear browsing data like history and cookies. Under Advanced, you can also change the search engine used from Bing to Google, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo.

Watch YouTube Via Silk

There's no native YouTube app on the Echo Show devices, but you can watch YouTube videos by going into the Silk browser ("Alexa, open Silk") and loading m.youtube.com (the mobile site). Tap the bookmark icon in the toolbar up top to bookmark it.

Watch More Streaming Services

It used to be the only native video streamer on the Echo Show was, naturally, Amazon Prime Video. Now there's support for more (at least for now). For example, say "Alexa, launch Netflix" to get the app on screen. I couldn't get Hulu to work, but found YouTube (via the browser), Food Network Kitchen, RedBull TV, and Tubi.



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