Amazon wants your Echo devices to be more than just a tool to turn on the lights and play some music. They want you to wake up and have Alexa give you all the information you need to start your day. That is where Flash Briefings come in.
What are Flash Briefings?
Flash Briefings are a way to utilize Amazon Alexa-enabled devices to provide news, weather, and other timely content in a bundled format. Users can customize which content they want and in what order they want to receive it. For instance, you can have your flash briefing start with the national news, followed by the local news, and end with the weather.
The Alexa Skills that make up your flash briefings are specifically designed for this format. Since flash briefings are meant to be used each day, the skills typically update at least every 24 hours to provide fresh content. They also tend to be short in duration.
Some skills offer video content that can be displayed on devices with a screen such as the Amazon Echo Show and Amazon Echo Spot.
How to listen to your Flash Briefing?
To start listening to your Flash Briefing simply say “Alexa, What’s my Flash Briefing?” or “Alexa, What’s in the News?”.
Once the briefing has begun, you can navigate from one skill to the next by stating “Next”, “Previous”, or “Cancel”. If you have a video Echo device such as the Show or Spot, you can also tap the screen for playback options.
How to setup your Alexa Flash Briefings?
The Flash Briefing feature already comes built in to your Alexa-enabled devices. To customize which skills you want associated with it, you’ll need to either use the Amazon Alexa app on your phone or go to your “Alexa Page” at Amazon.com.
1) Open the menu and select Settings.
2) Under Alexa Preferences select the Flash Briefing Option. You may need to scroll down a few pages to see this.
3) Toggle On and Off which Alexa Skills you want in your flash briefing. At the top you can choose to edit the order in which the skills are performed.
4) Select Get more Flash Briefing content to find additional news, sports, weather, and other types of services in the Alexa Skills store.
5) After choosing an Alexa Skill you want, tap the Enable button to add it to your account. Skills can be disabled at any time.
