New Feature Alert : Amazon Alexa Brief Mode
Another very heavily requested feature has been released to Amazon Echo owners in the form of Alexa’s Brief Mode. This new feature allows you to globally turn off Alexa’s short quick ‘OK’ messages. Great for home automation enthusiasts, you can now ask Alexa to turn on the lights and she just replies with 2 quick tones and the lights turn on. This is a really nice feature to cut down on the Alexa chatter in the house. We’ve been early adopters of Alexa in the house for a long while and now that we have made this change to brief mode, we are not sure how we feel about it. (We kind of miss the Acknowledgements!?) Ideally, (Amazon, if you are reading or listening), I would love to be able to schedule Brief Mode. Give Alexa the ability to yak away during daylight hours and then keep it quiet during the night. This type of non verbal response is a life saver when you ask to turn off a light at midnight so ultimately, if we have to choose, we keep it enabled full time until we can schedule it. It would be nice to maybe link it with the existing Do Not Disturb feature of the drop in and broadcast features.
To enable this new feature, you go to your Alexa app and rather than some of the device specific features like Follow up, this is an account specific feature that is enabled under Alexa Voice Responses.
So the full procedure is:
Alexa App –> hamburger icon –> Settings –> General –> Alexa Voice Responses.
My fingers are crossed that Scheduled Brief Mode is in the works and will be released in the future. But until then, this is a pretty handy feature to keep Alexa from waking the house.