Alexa gets Follow Up Mode … Sort of.

There is a cool new update to Alexa devices that just came out.  Follow-Up mode.  This enhanced mode allows you to say ‘Alexa, Turn off the Kitchen lights’, wait for her to say ‘OK’ and then follow up with ‘and turn on the Living Room lights.’ without having to Alexa again.  That’s pretty cool. You can keep saying and this, and that … as long as you wait for her to reply OK each time. 

This new setting can be enabled in either the Web dashboard or the Mobile app but it must be enabled for each device on a per device basis under settings.  By default it is set to off.  This is a great new enhancement but not quite as sophisticated as Google’s implementation of just saying, Ok Google, do this, this and that.  

It’s a start though. I’ve just finished enabling it for all my devices.  Echoes, Taps and Dots all worked fine.   I’m actually not sure why you wouldn’t want to enable it on all devices and why Amazon chose to make this an opt in feature.  The only thing I have come up with is it does continue to listen (and record) sounds and speech for the next 5 seconds after each request to see if there is another one.  I’ll have to do more testing in a non controlled way to see if ambient noises make it try to do stuff that doesn’t make sense after accomplishing the first task.
Check out this great video below to see it in action! 

Happy Automating
–Carlo