Amazon has today announced that it is expanding Alexa Routines to Fire TV to make it easier than ever for customers to control their entertainment. Starting today, Fire TV customers in Canada can take advantage of Alexa Routines to control their entertainment.
For those who aren’t familiar, Alexa Routines is an Alexa feature designed to make customers’ day-to-day lives easier by bundling Alexa and smart home features together seamlessly.
Fire TV owners can use the Alexa app to set up Routines to select actions such as powering their Fire TV on or off, opening a specific app, playing specific content, and pausing or resuming content, in addition to the actions on other Alexa-enabled and smart home devices.
For example, customers can create an Alexa Routine so that when someone in their household says, “Alexa, I’m getting a snack,” Alexa will pause their Fire TV content and turn on their smart lights. Customers can also create a Routine so that when someone says “Alexa, I’m back,” Alexa can say “OK – now back to your show,” turn off your smart lights, and resume playing content.
Users can also create a Routine so that when they say “Alexa, time for bed,” Alexa will power off their TV and begin dimming their smart lights.
We were able to go hands-on with Amazon’s new Fire TV Stick ($59.99 CAD) and Fire TV Stick Lite ($49.99 CAD). There’s not much to say about these streaming devices, other than they make it easy to bring streaming apps to your televisions.
Both stream up to 1080p HD with support for HDR, HDR 10, HDR10+, and HLG. Both support Dolby Atmos audio, and both have Alexa Voice Remotes. The difference is the Fire TV Stick’s remote can control your TV (power, volume buttons), while the Fire TV Stick Lite’s remote cannot.
While we would have liked to see a faster set up process (initial software updates take a while to install), overall these streaming sticks from Amazon offer amazing value for the price–especially ahead of Black Friday.
