I love my Amazon Echo. And alongside checking the weather, I mostly use the voice-powered smart speaker to play music.
That said, I’m not much of an Amazon Prime music user. I don’t know anyone who really is. And still, the device has defaulted to Amazon Prime Music with every single request, forcing broad requests like “Play the Beatles” or super specific requests for an exact song.
To use my preferred music service, Spotify, I had to ask Alexa to play a song on Spotify. Or, alternatively, you had to connect manually to the Echo via Bluetooth and play with your thumbs from the device itself.
But now Amazon is making that whole process easier by letting users choose Spotify or Pandora as their default music service.
Within the Alexa app, users can select their preferred service and simply ask for the music they desire, without having to specify the platform they want to stream from.
This is part of a broader push to diversify Alexa’s offerings. Amazon recently put out some new developer tools that allow for third-party software providers to include Alexa in their apps, as well as a hardware development kit for alternative speakers to plug in Alexa within their products.
Expect to see Amazon integrate with even more services and hardware, and as it does, offer more customization options for the end-user.
[via TheVerge]