Amazon continues to expand the functionality of its Alexa digital personal assistant. The company has confirmed that its assistant is now capable of allowing users to send SMS messages to their contacts with just voice commands. They simply need to ask Alexa to send a message to a specific contact and the assistant will figure out on its own the best way to route the message, either through SMS or via the Alexa messaging system that was launched last year.
There is one big limitation, though, this feature only works for sending SMS messages via Android smartphones for now. Users can set this up by following the instructions in the Alexa app on their Android device. They will have to navigate to Contacts > My Profile > Send SMS in the Conversations tab of the app to enable this feature.
They can then specify if they want to send a text message or just ask Alexa to send a message which it will route to Alexa devices first and if they’re not available, it will send the message over SMS instead. The routing to Alexa devices is an extension of a feature the company launched last year which enabled free calls and messaging between Echo devices.
Once it’s all set up, users can say “Send an SMS to [contact name]” to kick things off. However, it doesn’t support group messaging right now, MMS, and text-to-911. Users can disable the feature by following the same steps mentioned above in the Alexa app.
Filed in . Read more about Alexa and Amazon. Source: techcrunch