An Alexa-Powered Halloween (Smart Home Series Part 11)

An Alexa Powered Halloween:
Enhance Your Halloween Using Alexa and Your Amazon Echo

 

Halloween is upon us. Although Halloween falls on a Tuesday this year, many communities are celebrating this weekend.  Additionally, many of the adult parties are scheduled for Saturday. Many families are using this weekend to prepare for Halloween.  If you have an Amazon Echo or Dot, you can use Alexa as an adjunct to your Halloween preparation and celebrations.

Today, we return to our Smart Home Series.  This article is Part 11 of the series. You can go back and read Part 1 here.  This post examines fun, Halloween-related things to do with Alexa. We'll look at spooky skills, spooky sounds, and spooky videos, as well as how to find some Halloween-related recipes using Alexa.

Spooky Skills

As we learned earlier, Alexa has a plethora of skills which can extend her functionality. Amongst these skills are some specific Halloween oriented skills.  Remember, you can activate most skills by saying "Alexa, activate the [name of skill] skill."  (Skills which require account linking usually need to be activated from the skill's page at Amazon, or through the Skills section of the Alexa app.  More information about skills and how to activate them can be found in Part 3 of our Alexa series.)  Since most of these spooky skills do not require account linking, they can be activated with a voice command.

The Alexa App, In-Depth, Part 1 (Smart Home Series, Part 2)

The Alexa App, In Depth, Part 1: 

Getting the Alexa App,
Adding your Echo, and

Using Alexa as a Media Player
    

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The Alexa App is the Companion to the Echo Family of Devices;
Use the Alexa App to Set Up and Customize your Echo Device.

Part one of this series introduced Alexa and the Amazon Family of Echo Devices.  This week, we're starting our in-depth look at the Alexa app. This app is the companion to the Echo and other Alexa-enabled devices.  You set up your Echo and other Smart Home Devices using the Alexa App.

There is a lot to Alexa and the app itself, too much really to cover in one post. Thus, we're going to start with how to get the app, and what the app is compatible with. Then we'll go on to show you how to pair an Echo device with the app.  Finally, we'll talk about using Alexa as a media player. Part 2 of this article, (which will be Part 3 of the series) will continue our review of all the things you can do with Alexa.  After that, we'll review various Smart Home Devices and how to integrate them with Alexa.