Those lucky individuals who own an Amazon Echo will be impressed with the continuous ongoing improvements that are being thrown at the platform. Amazon has pushed out a feature update that sees a collaboration with Swedish music streaming service Spotify come into play. The world’s biggest music streaming service is now compatible with the hardware manufactured by one of the world’s biggest online retail firms. And that’s not all, today’s update also adds support for ordering an Uber right from Echo.
Having the ability to stream music from Echo and enjoy your favorite tunes isn’t brand new. The platform already supports Prime Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn. Before today, if you were to use Amazon Echo to stream music from Spotify, it involved using the hardware as a Bluetooth speaker and streaming the music directly from a connected smartphone or tablet. With today’s update, Spotify support is baked right into the Echo, with the user simply needed to link a Spotify account via the Alexa app to benefit from the goodness. Once it’s connected, you can ask Alexa things like:
“Alexa, play ‘jazz’ on Spotify.”
“Alexa, play the Today’s Top Hits playlist on Spotify.”
“Alexa, play Drake on Spotify.”
“Alexa, play the album ‘Born to Run’ on Spotify.”
The downside? It’s only available to Spotify Premium subscribers in the United States.
If you own an Amazon Echo, or are thinking of investing in the hardware, and want to give the baked-in-music streaming a try, then Spotify does still offer a 30-day premium account trial for those wanting to test it out before they make a financial commitment. Those 30-days should be more than enough time to come to a decision about whether or not parting with the $9.99 subscription fee is worth it just to stream music directly through the Amazon Echo from Spotify’s extensive catalog. If not, there’s still the ability to push just about any music to the Echo from a connected smartphone via Bluetooth.
As for Uber integration, again, once you get your account set-up in Alexa app, you can ask Alexa:
“Alexa, order me an Uber.”
“Alexa, call me an Uber.”
“Alexa, call me a Taxi.”
“Alexa, request me a ride.”
“Alexa, get me an Uber.”
In addition to announcing the collaboration with Spotify and Uber, Amazon Echo has also gained some other new tricks recently. The Echo can now also read Kindle books aloud on request, allow users to play Jeopardy!, and of course, the all important feature of being able to order a pizza from Domino’s. What a world we live in, and what a time to be alive!
If support for Spotify and Uber happens to be the feature of all features for you, then you may want to head over to Amazon and grab an Echo now if you haven’t already.
You can get Amazon Echo from Amazon today for $179.
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