Digital assistants have made our lives a bit simpler, especially if you need help in digitally organizing your life. Amazon’s Alexa has been especially helpful with the many skills that it has available for its users on its smartphones, Echo smart speakers and smart displays. The latest feature drop released last December 2020 has a lot of new goodies available but probably the most important is a new skill called “Tell me when” which gives you information about upcoming moments, past events, emails from specific users, etc.
While you already have a reminders feature on Alexa, what you do usually is set up a reminder for a specific day and time to, well, remind you of whatever it is that needs reminding. This new skill though is a bit more useful as you can simply ask Alexa to “tell you when” without having to input anything or tell Alexa to remind you about things. You can ask Alexa to tell you when an email comes in from a certain contact. You can also ask when an upcoming event in your calendar is.
You can also use it to ask more general things not related to your connected apps. “Alexa, tell me when the Olympics will start” (well, if it does push through this year, that is) or “Alexa, tell me when WandaVision starts ?”This new skill is also a bit more proactive in the alerts compared to the reminders skill as you don’t have to set up anything and just ask your digital assistant to remind you when that day comes.
The feature drop also has a few other new skills you can try out. You can now tell Alexa to “delete everything I’ve said” so you don’t need to go to the privacy settings to manage recordings of your commands and requests. You can also ask Alexa to automatically delete all of your smart home history for specific time periods starting from three months to as long as 18 months. Alexa users also now have a Live Translation feature on an Echo device and it can translate between English and French, Spanish, Hindi, Portugese (Brazilian), German, or Italian.
All these features are now available as soon as you update your Alexa app to the latest version. You may even ask Alexa to tell you when a next update is coming up.
