Amazon rolls out music and podcast features for Alexa's smart home 'Routines'

Polycount

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Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant has become pretty popular over the years. It's gained advanced smart home control features and a host of user-created "skills" that give the AI extra functionality.

However, Amazon hasn't left the development of new features entirely up to the community. Last year, the online retail giant launched the "Alexa Routines" feature which allowed users to issue a single command to perform multiple actions. For example, you could say "Alexa, goodbye" to have the AI turn your home's lights off and lock the doors.

Amazon is expanding that functionality further today, finally making it possible to add music to your Routines. As of writing, the feature can pull music from Amazon Music, Spotify, Pandora, Deezer and TuneIn - Google Play Music and Apple Music are not available at this time.

To take advantage of this new feature, you'll need to visit the Routines section of your Alexa app and tap the "Add action" button. You'll find that actions can now play individual songs, podcasts or playlists from any of the previously-mentioned music services.

If music volume is a concern, you can simply set a volume control action to trigger before any music plays. This could be pretty handy if you partied particularly hard the night before. Finally, if you'd prefer not to listen to a given playlist's songs in the same order every morning, you can modify the music action to shuffle the playlist for you automatically.

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