Introduce Alexa to your family for a better experience on your Echo smart speaker
Your Echo device can now easily recognize who’s speaking and tailor its responses – all thanks to the magic of Household Profiles and Voice Profiles.
Few people realize that their Alexa smart speaker is capable of delivering personalized experiences to individuals in the home, and Amazon is always developing new features which will build on these themes.
Google Assistant has led the way in terms of voice matching to different profiles, but Amazon is catching up. If you’re looking to create user profiles for those in your home, there’s plenty to get started with.
Alexa Household Profiles
The first key personalization feature here is called Household Profiles. This enables you to essentially have different users with different profiles, which you can swap between on your Amazon Echo device as needed.
Don’t confuse this with Amazon Household, which is for family members sharing Prime, Kindle and other Amazon content with one another.
Within the Alexa world, Amazon Households lets you share eligible content on compatible Alexa devices – think photos on an Echo smart display, payment methods and so on.
Why use Alexa Voice Profiles?
Recognized Voices are most useful in homes where perhaps everyone isn’t a family member – shared housing, university digs – and situations where you might want to use your own Amazon account.
This is especially useful for shopping, where you might want to add items to your own shopping list, not that of your housemate.
There are some other nifty tricks, too. You can use Alexa Household Profiles to get around the issue of sharing Spotify accounts. While you can’t use multiple Spotify accounts on one Alexa profile, you can if you swap Amazon accounts altogether.
How to change your Alexa Household Profiles
To add additional accounts, follow these steps:
1. Head into the Alexa app.
2. Navigate through Settings > AccountSettings> Your Profile & Family.
3. Alternatively, log in to alexa.amazon.com and head to ‘Settings’, scroll down to the ‘Alexa Account’ section and hit ‘Household Profile’.
You should see yourself listed there, along with any Household members that you’ve added. Once you’ve added more than one profile, you can switch manually with, “Alexa, switch profile,” or something similar.
If you’re not sure which profile you’re using, just say, “Alexa, what profile are you using?”, and your Alexa speaker will let you know.
There’s also Alexa Voice ID and Visual ID, which will automatically switch profiles for certain features. These select features are music via Amazon Music, messages, calls, shopping and your Flash Briefing.
For everything else, you’ll have to manually switch profiles.
What are Alexa Voice Profiles?
It took a while to catch up with Google, but Alexa Voice Profiles are active in both the US and the UK.
Training Alexa to recognize your voice is a simple exercise, parroting back phrases before you can start assigning certain features to your voice alone.
(Image credit: The Ambient)
How to create an Alexa Voice Profile
Follow the steps below to set up your Voice Profile:
1. Head to your Alexa app and go to ‘Settings’.
2. Tap on ‘Alexa Account’ and then ‘Your Profile and Family’.
3. Choose ‘Voice ID’.
4. Tap ‘Begin’.
5. Complete the checklist.
Alternatively, go to your Echo device and say, “Alexa, learn my voice,” and follow Alexa’s instructions.
Personalized calling and messaging
While Spotify generally gets the same treatment as Amazon Music in the Alexa experience, Amazon’s own service benefits from voice match.
If you’re the proud owner of an Amazon Music Unlimited Family Plan, you can train your voice and then assign it to a member within your account.
Then again, if the words “Amazon Music Unlimited Family Plan” are all Greek to you, it might be worth checking out our guide to Amazon Music, which should shed some light.
Shopping
Likewise, shopping greatly benefits from the voice match feature.
Training your voice will enable you to confirm purchases just using your voice, and stop the kids from adding 100 unicorns to your shopping basket, just for chuckles.
Flash briefing
We all have different interests, so Alexa will tailor flash briefings to your voice.
What’s more, if your partner has heard the headlines but you haven’t, it will know that you’re yet to be caught up on key news stories and repeat them for you. Likewise, if you’ve already heard the news of the day, Alexa won’t bombard you with the same content twice.
Skills
Late last year, Amazon made the Alexa skill personalization capability available for the Alexa Skills Kit.
This means that Alexa developers can leverage voice profiles in custom skills, enabling their skill to respond based on the voice interacting with their skill.
There are already some Alexa skills already using it such as Uber, Vodafone and the 7-Minute Workout.
How to create a second Voice Profile
Obviously, the above is great, but Voice Match comes into its own when more than one person is using Alexa on a daily basis. Here’s how to get a second user set up using:
1. Have your second person install the Alexa app on their smartphone.
2. They should sign in with the same Amazon ID and password as you.
3. They should then choose ‘I’m someone else” from the list.
4. Repeat the steps above to train Alexa to recognize their voice.
How to delete an Alexa Voice Profile
If you ever need to delete a Voice Profile, do the following:
1. In the Alexa app, go to ‘Settings’.
2. Tap on ‘Alexa Account’ and then ‘Your Profile & Family’.
3. Choose a person and tap ‘Voice ID’.
4. Tap ‘Delete my voice.
What is Alexa Visual ID?
Visual ID is just like Voice ID, except it uses the camera on a compatible Echo Show to recognize you in order to show tailored content.
To set it up, just go up to a compatible Echo Show – that’s a Echo Show 8 (2nd or 3rd Generation), Echo Show 10 (3rd Generation) or Echo Show 15 – and say “Alexa, learn my face”.