Alexa brings awesome new powers to Amazon’s iPhone app

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It does almost everything you would expect Alexa to do.
It does almost everything you would expect Alexa to do.
Photo: Amazon

You can now ask Alexa to do your shopping, fetch information, and control your smart devices without a fancy Amazon speaker.

Starting today, the virtual assistant is being integrated into the Amazon shopping app for iPhone in the U.S., with support for thousands of skills. It can find products and track orders, play music and movies on Amazon Prime, and lots more.

“While voice search for products sold on Amazon has previously been available within the Amazon shopping app, Alexa goes far beyond search, explains Amazon.

Almost everything you can do with Alexa using an Amazon speaker can be done inside the shopping app for iPhone. Almost. Not everything is available due to certain restrictions, and the newly-announced Door Lock API isn’t supported, so you can’t lock and unlock doors just yet.

To use it, simply open the Amazon app and tap the microphone icon. You can then tell Alexa to “turn on my garage light,” “set my thermostat to 72 degrees,” “play Taylor Swift,” or “order toilet paper.” It can also tell you jokes, and fetch sports scores and weather forecasts.

Amazon says that Alexa support is starting to rollout today inside its shopping app, but it won’t be available to all users until next week. There’s no word on when the feature might reach other markets.

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