Dealing with a newborn can be a heck of a task. From bathing, changing diapers, feeding, sleeping, to soothing, it is all very time consuming. Most of the time I’m running around with my hands full: the baby’s coat, socks, dirty diapers, sanitized bottles, coffee, tea, wipes, and water for the humidifier. Oh, and I need to keep my hands clean before I touch this and that. Oh no, my phone is a petri dish, I will look at that message later, I will note this down later, I will research this later.
With all of this baby buzz, I have found the Echo Dot voice controlled features with Alexa to be very helpful. Although the features used seem small and trivial, it allows handsfree, quick command for action or data with ease. The following are my personally heavily used features.
1. Timers
“Alexa, set timer to 19 minutes.”
Preparing bottles during the day or night, can be a task especially if you need to set the timer for the bottle warmer accordingly. Once I drop that bottle in the bottle warmer, I tell Alexa to set a timer for 3 – 4 minutes and continue with the next task. Also feel free to take advantage of overlapping simultaneous timers. You can name the alarms to differentiate and Alexa will use this selected naming to tell you which timer is up.
2. Alarms
“Alexa, set an alarm for 3:00 am.”
Setting an alarm has been a life saver. When I use my phone to set up my alarm manually, I sometimes end up setting it incorrectly, or swiping left to silence my alarm unconsciously. I end up waking up an hour later than intended, startled, waking up my wife, wandering around lost, confused on whether I missed a feeding. I prefer a more exact post feeding verbal alarm configuration, with the usual Alexa confirmation statement after commanding the alarm. Just like timers, you can also set multiple alarms.
3. List Creation
“Alexa, add bagels to the shopping list”.
Adding items to Alexa’s list for what needs to get done or what needs to be picked up at the store immediately when we think of it has been a plus. Before heading out, I usually ask whomever was assisting me and my wife if there was anything missing in the kitchen. I would then ask Alexa to read off her list, to make sure there was nothing missed during the day’s action. I would add this to Keep Notes and share it with my wife. This list she can update live as I walked around the store checking items off. This saves me from making another freezing trip to the store. If an item is forgotten it is always a collaborative effort/blame. (The blame game is always waiting).
4. Weather
“Alexa, how is the weather today?”
I am a fan of quickly confirming the weather as we are adding layers to the new member of the family before heading out.
5. Llubyes
“Alexa, play llubyes.”
This is one of the cards I pull out to help soothe the baby. You can set a timer to this request. So once we lay him down to sleep, Alexa can finish the job. Honestly it helps us get back to sleep as well.
6. White Noise
“Alexa, play white noise for 15 minutes.”
Between white noise and lullabies I am usually able to soothe the baby to sleep. Switching it up helps, since sometimes babies seem to become less affected with more use. Another benefit to the white noise, besides soothing, is blocking or muffling out noise from outside the rooms. You know, from all of those very lovely newborn guests.
This playlist of white/background sounds is not from Amazon Music directly. It is made by TMsoft, but Alexa automatically calls into these third party (not Amazon music) sounds just like any standard command or preinstalled Alexa application, once requested. There is also an Alexa music station for white noise, but I find it to switch white noise sounds way too often.
7. Entertaining visitors (Spotify & Alexa)
“Alexa, play some modern Jazz.”
Once a newborn comes into the picture, family and friends are bound to swarm the house. Commanding a large array of background music has been a major benefit for entertaining guests. In addition to playlists on Amazon Music, using Spotify provides a free larger variety and allows me to easily control the playlists from my phone. Especially when my guests get way too loud. During situations like these, entertaining guests and performing child care tasks must happen in parallel, having two different Echo Dots playing different content, in different rooms is very handy.
8. Drop In
“Alexa, drop into the living room echo.”
Easy communication around the house is essential, Alexa’s drop in feature can be useful. I have multiple Echo Dots around the house which can be used as an in home intercom system. A great alternative to yelling. I can communicate with the Echo Dot in the living room using the drop in feature from our bedroom or nursery to ask my wife for assistance.
9. Lighting control
“Alexa, set kitchen lights on.”
“Alexa, turn off the living room light in 15 min.”
Another feature that makes life a little easier when stumbling across the house to get item “X” from the kitchen. Lights can also be dimmed or colors changed to preference.
Most of these requests get processed by Alexa’s standard application. For ones like the light control or music selection a little searching and configuring on the Alexa app is needed. For the light controls I am using a couple of Alexa configured Konxie LED WiFi Smart Lights Bulbs.
Separately, these features seem miniscule and trivial to do in any other manner. Bringing the Alexa, voice control features into context of many other todos, make it impactful to the day to day tasks. I think voice control as an interface has its place in the hectic days of users. The practical aspects of daily use takes time to establish. This is something mobile phones have had years to do. Voice control technology, although slowly defining its place, is a key, easy flowing alternative interface to enable the technology we already know and love to use.
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