I’m playing catch-up here and wanted to cover some features that we do have in the UK and that might be useful… as well as some that we’ve been promised and not received.

Using Reminders:

Firstly, great news – reminders can now be set on your UK Echo. I’m sure most of you know this already, but you can ask for reminders in a number of ways:

Alexa, remind me to take out the bins at 8am next Thursday

Alexa, remind me to send the data a week from now at 4pm

Alexa, remind me to watch Spice World on 24th August at 3pm

Alexa, remind me to check my to-do list every morning at 9am

This is great. Unfortunately managing and deleting reminders can only be done via the app, but you can ask “Alexa, what’s my next reminder” and it’ll give you an overview of the reminders you have upcoming.

Named Timers in the UK:

It’s great that we can now have multiple timers in the UK, just asking for another timer works a treat, but sometimes it can be confusing if you’re keeping track of multiple things and you’re not sure which timer is complete… this is where named timers were promised some time ago (and work fine in the US). The idea is you say “set a rice timer for 10 minutes” and then “set a chicken timer for 8 minutes” etc. Alexa should then be able to tell you how long is left on what etc. Unfortunately, despite reports that these work in the UK, I don’t find that they do. Has anyone had any success?