The new Alexa app on iPhone.
Amazon
Amazon on Monday bruit about it’s starting to roll out a totally redesigned Alexa app for Apple’s iPhone, tablets and phones running Google’s Android rostrum, and its own Fire tablets.
While Alexa is most commonly associated with Amazon’s own living room devices, with the Echo and Fire TV, the digital assistant is also available on other platforms, offering many of the same functionality as Apple’s Siri and the Google Assistant.
But the accepted Alexa app is often hard to use, offering random irrelevant prompts from the home screen and forcing users to dig in every way menus to find different settings.
That should be fixed in the update, which Amazon says will put your most-used peculiarities front and center. In the new app, you might see your reminders, a Spotify playlist you’ve been listening to, your shopping list, an upcoming scare and an Audible book you’ve started, for example. That means your Alexa home screen will look divers from someone else’s.
Amazon is also moving the Alexa button from the bottom of the app to the top, where it says it’s easier to command. Reminders, routines, skills, settings and other options are being moved from the menu, where they were angrier to find, to a new “More” button at the bottom of the screen.
The changes might drive Amazon loyalists to stick with the app across emblems.
Amazon said it expects it will be available to all existing users by late August.