Oliver Haslam on July 13, 2017, 6:51 am

You Can Now Control Your Amazon Fire TV Using Alexa On Echo

Owners of both an Amazon Echo and an Amazon Fire TV device rejoice, for you can now use one to control the other using Alexa.

Can you guess which way around that might be? That’s right, following an update to the software running on Fire TV devices users can now ask Alexa to control what content is being displayed on their TV without ever having to pick up a remote control in anger.

In order to use the new feature, users simply need to link their Fire TV device to their account via the Alexa app on their smartphone. Once that has been done, asking Alexa on Echo to do things like open apps, search for content or even navigate within content will be a simple case of barking orders into the air.

If all this sounds a little familiar, that is because it works in much the same way as Amazon’s Alexa Voice Remote for Fire TV devices does, although here, you simply do not need the remote in order to talk to your TV.

Unfortunately, not all Fire TV devices are compatible, with all except for the original first generation Fire TV Stick supported by the new feature in the software update. That should cover plenty of people, although as always, there will no doubt be people who are left disappointed here.

Amazon’s move mimics that of Google’s, which saw its Chromecast devices able to be controlled via commands spoken to the Google Home device. Both Amazon and Google continue to trade blows in the home assistant market, and with Apple set to join with its HomePod later in the year, things are set to really get interesting before 2018 rolls around.