That small inconvenience aside, you can still do all the great things with Alexa on the Fire TV that you can do with the Echo. You can ask about the weather, call up Prime streaming music, add items to your shopping list, check the news, see how your favorite team is doing, and more. One might easily argue, even, that despite the hassle of pressing the button and needing to have the television attached to the Fire TV on during operation, that the on-screen displays more than make up for the inconvenience. While the Echo is limited to giving you audio feedback (and sending additional information to the companion mobile Alexa app), the Fire TV implementation of Alexa has really polished on-screen cards–as seen in the screenshot collection above.
If all this sounds like a Fire TV feature you’re on board with taking advantage of, let’s take a look at what you need and how to use it.
What You Need
To enjoy Alexa on your Fire TV you, at the minimum need the following things:
A first generation Fire TV or above, updated to Fire OS 5 or above with the included voice remote. A first generation Fire TV Stick or above, updated to Fire OS 5 with the optional voice remote.
Support for the older Fire TV units is a relatively new (and welcome) change–now anyone with a Fire TV can use Alexa. You can check your Fire TV version number by navigating to Settings > System > About on your Fire TV.
While the Fire TV has always shipped with a voice remote, the first generation of the Fire TV Stick did not. As of this article you can pick up a voice remote for $30, but the difference between getting a whole Fire TV Stick package with the standard remote ($35) and with the voice remote ($45) is only ten bucks. With that in mind if you need a voice remote it might be worth just getting another Fire TV bundle.
NOTE: From this point forward we’ll refer to both devices simply as the “Fire TV” for the sake of brevity.
How to Use Alexa On the Fire TV
If you’ve recently purchased your Fire TV or updated to Fire OS 5 or above, Alexa integration is automatically turned on–though if you haven’t used one of Alexa’s specific triggers you may not have realized it. Let’s take a look at how to trigger Alexa with the voice remote and then how to customize your Alexa experience.
Summoning Alexa with a Button Press
To summon Alexa, let’s start from the main Fire TV menu.
Press and hold the microphone button on your voice remote.
Let’s start off with a simple natural language command. Press and hold the microphone button and begin speaking (you’ll see the “Listening…” microphone indicator pop up on the screen). Make a weather request like: “What’s the weather like in Beverly Hills?”
Almost instantly–the Alexa system is really fast–you’ll get audio feedback and a nice looking pop-over information card with the forecast.
Hit the back button on the remote to return to the main screen. Let’s try another simple command to dip into our Prime music collection: “Play some jazz music.”
“All Jazz” courtesy of Prime Music, with some nice cover art to go with it, will start playing and be presented in an information card.
If you want an on-screen run through of some various tricks and techniques you can always head over to Settings > Applications > Alexa > Things To Try for a laundry list of commands.
There, you’ll find all sorts of information about using Alexa with audiobooks, creating and checking calendar entries, and more.
Fine Tuning Alexa with the Alexa App
To that end, it’s very useful to fine-tune settings from the web-based control panel, located at alexa.amazon.com, or through the mobile Alexa app (iOS/Android/Fire OS). Both the app and the web site have an identical interface.
You can adjust your device specific settings (like the street address and zip code) of your Fire TV in the Settings > Alexa Devices > [Yourname]’s Fire TV menu:
All other settings are general across all your Alexa devices, like your preferred news sources, and can be found under Settings > Account:
