10 Amazon Alexa skills for Indian users

| Published: Monday, April 2, 2018, 15:59 [IST]

Amazon Echo spent quite a lot of time being tweaked and tuned before it made its debut in the Asian market last year. The virtual assistant Alexa made its debut three years ago and Amazon has added a wide variety of features, termed skills over the years, a lot of the features of Alexa had to be modified to suit the needs of the Indian market.

This included features which took advantage of a lot of local services like Ola and Uber. The notable features of Alexa include:

Book an Uber or an Ola

Alexa owners can book a cab through Ola or Uber by linking their accounts with the app, after you have linked your Ola or Uber account to Alexa, the virtual assistant will be able to book a cab for you.

Control smart home products

Alexa is the go-to for anyone in India who wishes to set up a smart home as Google Home is not yet available here.

Buy things from Amazon

To order something from Amazon say something along the lines of "Alexa, order lightbulb" will prompt Alexa to go through your order history and note if you have ordered the item in the past and ask you if you wish to order the same again.

Get food from Zomato

Activating the Zomato skill allows Alexa to order food to your house or suggest restaurant recommendations. Alexa can find a list of the restaurants available nearby of your preferred cuisine.

Get score updates

Asking Alexa the score is all you need to do in order to receive the latest scores of all recent matches but if you wish to receive the score of a particular match, including the name of the match in your query to receive detailed statistics about your match.

Hear the flash briefing

Alexa plugs into various news resources and asking Alexa what the latest news updates are will give you a briefing about what's going on in the world.

Play songs from Prime Music

While Prime Music is not available in India as of now, it can be previewed, it has a huge collection which includes classical rock, heavy metal, reggae, electronica etc. as well as a huge collection of regional songs.

Ask it to tell jokes

Alexa has been tailored to fit the tastes of the local market, all you have to do is ask it for a joke to be hit with a rib tickling joke which may or may not be funny.