How to use Alexa Routines to make your Amazon Echo even smarter

If you’re relying on Amazon Echo smart speakers and displays to build out your smart home, you should be using Alexa Routines. What are Alexa Routines? They’re a powerful way to automate Echo speakers and displays, Amazon Fire TV streaming players, and any other smart home devices you want to control with Alexa voice commands. I’ll show you how to make the most of them.

Routines are terrific, because they can link multiple actions to a single Alexa voice command. Say “Alexa, turn off the bedroom lamp,” for example, and instead of just having the lamp turn off, a Routine can also turn off your TV, turn down your thermostat, and turn on your porch light. That’s a lot more convenient than uttering three separate commands, even with Alexa’s follow-up mode enabled so you don’t need to repeat the Alexa wake word three times. You can also set Routines to run at specific times or in response to various smart home triggers.

This story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart speakers and displays.

This can be useful for wake-up and bedtime automations, customizing your home security setup, or toggling certain smart home devices when you leave the house. Still, setting up Alexa Routines—and getting the most out of them—takes a bit of work and creativity. Here’s what you need to know:

How to trigger an Alexa Routine

To begin creating Routines, open the Alexa app for Android or iOS, tap the “More” button in the bottom-right corner, then select Routines. To add a new Routine, hit the + button in the top-right corner.

All Routines consist of one trigger (such as a voice command) and one or more corresponding actions. Start by setting up your trigger by selecting “When this happens.”

From here, you’ll see eight options:

• Voice: Triggers the routine with one or more voice commands, such as “Alexa, get ready for bed.”
• Schedule: Runs the routine at a specific time on specific days, or around sunrise and sunset.
• Smart home: Triggers the routine based on input from Alexa-supported smart home devices, such as cameras, motion sensors, and water detectors.
• Location: Uses your phone’s geo-location to trigger a routine at home, work, or a specific address.
• Alarms: Triggers a routine when you dismiss the alarm on an Echo device, either at any time or during specific time ranges.
• Sound Detection: Uses Echo speakers to detect specific sounds, such as a baby crying, a person snoring, or an appliance beeping.
• Guard: Triggers routines based on whether Alexa Guard is set to home or away mode.
• Echo Button: Amazon has discontinued these big, smackable smart home buttons, but you can still use existing ones for home automation.

Setting up these triggers is mostly self-explanatory. Just select one from the list, and then follow the on-screen prompts. You’ll then return to the “New Routine” menu where you can set up corresponding actions.

You can also prevent some triggers from running outside of specific days and times; for instance, if you only want a motion sensor to trigger alert-related actions at night. Just look for the “Anytime” section and hit the “Change” button next to it. (This option is available for Smart Home, Location, Alarms, Alexa Guard, and Echo Button triggers.)

Alexa Routine actions

After you’ve set up a trigger, you can start selecting actions to go with it by hitting the “Add action” button, which brings up a long list of options:

• Custom: Quietly execute any voice command you would normally say to Alexa.
• Smart Home: Control your lights, plugs, TVs, and other “Works with Alexa” devices.
• Alexa says: Make your Echo or Fire TV say something out loud. This can either be a custom phrase or one of several preset utterances, such as a joke or salutation.
• Announcement: Broadcast a message to all or some of your Echo speakers and Fire TV devices.
• Audible: Have Alexa read an e-book.
• Calendar: Have Alexa read the current day’s agenda, tomorrow’s schedule, or just the next event.
• Calling: Enable or disable phone calls on Echo speakers that are linked to an AT&T or T-Mobile phone number.
• Date & Time: Alexa will read the current date or time.
• Delivery updates: Find out if any packages are arriving from Amazon today.
• Device settings: Control the volume, stop audio, or enable Do Not Disturb on an Echo or Fire TV device.
• Drop In Notification: Sends a notification to your phone, which you can press to initiate a “Drop In” call on another Echo device.
• Entertain Me: Alexa will pick an entertaining activity.
• Fire TV: Control power, play specific content, pause or resume video, or return to the home screen on a Fire TV device.
• Food and Cooking: Alexa will read trending recipes.
• Guard: Set Alexa Guard to Away mode.
• IFTTT: Trigger applets via the IFTTT automation service.
• Information: Get stock updates, celebrity birthdays, and other general info.
• Music & Podcasts: Play audio on Echo or Fire TV devices, either indefinitely or for a set period of time.
• News: Alexa will read a Flash Briefing or some positive news.
• Notifications: Display a custom alert on your phone.
• Skills: Interact with third-party Alexa voice skills.
• Sounds: Play canned sounds such as bells, buzzers, and animal noises.
• Style: Get an outfit recommendation.
• Traffic: Get a traffic report for your area.
• Wait: Delay the next action in a routine by up to four hours.
• Weather: Get a general forecast or specific details on things like rain, air quality, and humidity.

After choosing an action and any related options, you’ll see a confirmation screen, showing what Alexa will do. Hit “Next” to confirm, and you’ll be back on the main “New Routine” menu.

Note that if your action involves audio playback or a voice response from Alexa, you’ll see a “From” option at the bottom of this menu. Use this to choose which Alexa device should play the audio.

Building up your Alexa Routine

Now that you’ve added a trigger and a corresponding action, you can hit “Save” to finish building your Routine.

Alternatively, you can add more actions that correspond to a single trigger. For instance, you might want to adjust multiple smart home devices in response to a motion sensor trigger, or have a single voice command that plays music and turns on the lights.

To add more actions to your Routine, just hit the “Add action” button again. After selecting an action, rearrange the order by dragging the = on the right side of the screen.

Again, don’t forget to hit “Save” in the top-right corner after setting everything up. You can always tap on any Routine in the Routines menu to modify it later.

Try these useful Alexa Routines

If you’re lost as to what kinds of Routines to create, head back to the main Routines menu, then tap on the “Gallery” tab at the top. Here you’ll find all kinds of recommendations, grouped into categories such as Morning, Evening, and Home Automation. Here are some examples:

• Amazon’s “Morning Shine” routine turns on lights, reports the weather, and plays music when you dismiss an Alexa alarm within certain morning hours.
• The “Dinner Time” routine makes an announcement on all Echo speakers, enables Do Not Disturb on all Alexa devices, and plays some “dinner music.”
• The “Lock doors when closed” routine uses a door sensor and smart lock to detect when a door is closed, locks it after five minutes, and sends a confirmation to your phone.

In all cases, you can tap on one of these ready-made Routines to modify its parameters, then hit “Save” to add it to your collection. But you can also just use them for inspiration before creating your own Routines from scratch.

More Alexa Routine tips

Here are a handful of extra tricks that might come in handy as you’re setting up Alexa Routines:

• Extra Routine options: Tap on a Routine, then hit the ⋮ button at the top-right. From here you can change the trigger, copy the actions to a new Routine, get a shareable link for others to use the same Routine, or delete it.
• Disable a Routine by taping on it in the Routines menu, flipping the “Enabled” toggle, and hitting the back button. This is better than deleting a routine if you plan to use it again later.
• Group devices together: Head to the Devices tab in the Alexa app, then use the “Create a Group” function to assign smart home devices to a specific room or area. This makes Routine setup a lot easier, as you can have a single action that controls the entire group.
• Make voice shortcuts: One of the simplest uses for Routines is to create abbreviated voice shortcuts, especially for commands that require a lot of specific syntax. For instance, instead of saying “ask Plex to play library radio,” you could have a Routine that executes this action with the voice command “play my songs.”
• Actions after music: If your Routine includes music or podcasts, they’ll need to be the last action in the Routine unless you attach a time limit to them. If you do, Alexa can execute more actions after the audio stops.
• Use your phone: Not near an Echo speaker or Fire TV? You can still execute Routines through the Alexa mobile app by tapping the little blue voice control button.

Alexa Routines still aren’t perfect. It’d be nice to have a vacation mode that skipped Routines for a certain number of days, and Alexa’s app still doesn’t support multi-user geofencing, so triggers can only be based on one person’s location. You also can’t have multiple triggering conditions, akin to what Google Home has enabled with its advanced scripting tools.

Still, Alexa’s Routines have come a long way in recent years, lifting many of the limitations that made once made them frustrating to use. The biggest obstacle now is thinking up everything you might use Routines to accomplish.

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