New Feature Alert! Alexa’s Remember this!
One of the features I have been wanting a WHILE for is now here with Alexa’s Remember this feature enhancement. You can now give Alexa (and Amazon obviously) little bits of information that is unique to you or your home with the new Remember command. ‘Alexa, Remember I put the checkbook in the kitchen drawer.’ Then a month later, you can ask ‘Alexa, where did I put the checkbook?’ and it will respond with ‘This is what you told me: The checkbook is in the kitchen drawer’.
So many times I have these little things I put around the house and then I quickly forget where I put them. In the past, I used to use an online service to remember these little things via text message but voice is clearly the best UI for these types of impromptu things. This type of skill will most likely lead me to purchase an Alexa Dot for the garage now. So many times, I squirrel something away somewhere in there and then have the hardest time finding it (if ever). Other ideas I have for this new feature are setting up some easy guided questions for guests at the house. Things like, Alexa remember that the cups are in the top cabinet or Alexa, make a note that the silverware is in the drawer to the left of the sink. These types of handy question answer types things are going to really give a personal touch to the conversational style coming to Alexa in the near future.
This new skill seems to build upon the Alexa BluePrints extension that allowed for custom question/answer. (Alexa, Who is the best Dad? / Carlo is clearly the best dad around, hands down). There does seem to be a pretty glaring oversight on Amazon’s part with the fact that there is no easy way to forget anything. You can go to the UI and there is a delete button on the card but no big master list. I assume this will get fixed in the future but right now, that part can get pretty frustrating for things/data/ that change.. (like where something might be). Fingers crossed that this gets addressed quickly.
Blueprints were initially going to be my answer to my Home Assistant cheat sheet todo task (https://github.com/CCOSTAN/Home-AssistantConfig/issues/277) but doing this via speech will be even easier now.
This new feature should be available to all US users today.
What type of Q/A skills are you thinking about using this new feature for? Let us know in the comments.
– Carlo