EVERYTHING You Can Do With The Echo Show 8

[Music] whether you just got an Echo Show 8 or you've had one for a while there is a lot of stuff that this device can do and instead of you having to go out there and do all the research on it I have compiled all of that into this one video so sit back relax and let's talk about everything you can do with the Echo Show 8 hey everybody welcome back to another video if you just picked up the Echo Show 8 I got to say you'd made a good choice this is one of my favorite Echo devices that they sell out there and I have covered my fair share of the Amazon ecosystem e ecosystem is a rapidly expanding platform driven by the assistant Alexa mute of course it doesn't mute itself okay well that is a good reminder right there in this video today we're going to be using the word Alexa a lot now I'm going to mute that word in this video so it doesn't trigger your devices but if you have changed your wake word to something else go ahead and mute that device now otherwise you're on your own now back to what I was saying earlier I have covered a lot of the Amazon ecosystem I have got a full playlist full of tips and tricks and other videos and reviews everything all jam-packed up so you guys can check that video out also be sure to subscribe for future videos we're going to be putting out on these devices helping you get the most out of them also it would be a big help to me if you guys can share these videos with other people that you know with these devices and also give these videos a thumbs up it really help me out and spreads the words on these videos If you guys like them now with all of that said let's go ahead and get started with everything that you can do with the Echo Show 8 so the line of Echo Show devices is essentially a digital display with Amazon Alexa built into it if we take a look at the back of the device we have just a power port gone on the days of the 3.5 mm Jack for external speakers now behind the dis we have a full range of two 2in built-in speakers with a passive Bas radiator it uses these speakers with a new feature called spatial audio that fills the space with sound while room adaption technology automatically analyzes the Acoustics of the room fine-tuning playback for optimal sound on the top of the device there are buttons for mute volume down volume up and a slider to cover the camera for privacy between the buttons are small holes for microphones looking at the front we've got an 8 in touchscreen display with a whopping 13 megapixel camera which is the best that the Echo Show devices offer on the bottom of the display is a light bar this is used to notify you when the voice assistant is listening but can also display other colors for example red when the device is muted or yellow when you have a notification now some additional features inside include dualband Wi-Fi Bluetooth for streaming audio from your phone to the this device or you can connect an external speaker we also have a built-in thread border router and this is compatible with matter now if you are not familiar with matter in a nutshell it is a new way for your smart home devices to communicate with each other I did do a dedicated video talking about matter and everything that you can do with it so I will leave a link for that in the description if you guys want to check it out on the front of the display above the screen it also has an ambient light sensor for dimming the screen and uses the camera to detect when somebody's in the room with that detection feature you can set up home automations so that when somebody walks in the room it can automatically turn on a light also on the display you can upload your own personal pictures into Amazon photos now if you are a prime user you get Amazon photos for free up to 5 gigs I do have a full video talking about that in the tips and tricks playlist so go check that out if you want to know more but once you have those videos uploaded you can use the photo frame feature to show your own personal pictures on this device so so like with all the other Echo devices this has the Alexa Voice Assistant built in this is going to allow you to request things like songs or timers or alarms to be set on the device in addition to that with the echo devices this is also a touchscreen display so you can scroll through the different menus if you want to do that if we scroll side to side we can advance the display or go back to something that we've already seen scrolling down from the top will give us some more options we've got options for home settings do not disturb brightness notifications alarms photo frame communicate music Smart Home Videos routines and active media now you might notice a lot of junk on the display daily insights recently played songs weather and even some food inspiration these are all things that can junk up your display to get rid of them we're going to swipe down from the top and click on settings we're then going to scroll down to home content and here is where all of your options are to turn on and off so you may may see things like Finance maybe you don't want to look at that other options like news these are all the things that are going to be displaying on your home screen anything that you don't want to see I recommend turning it off so what are some things that you can't do with this device well the first off is you can't install apps all of the features and functions on this device are pre-installed by Amazon and you can't pick and choose what you're going to be adding now the next thing is that pretty much everything on this device is streaming from the internet so you will have to ask Alexa for most everything and lastly this device is not weatherproof if you put it outside and it gets wet it's going to get ruined so ideally just keep these things in the house so what kind of media can we get on these devices Prime video Netflix Hulu and tub are all major native apps you'll see available and we also have the option for the brand new Fire TV channel this channel is going to give us some additional viewing options unfortunately the show 8 does not support Disney Plus or Max at this time but that can always change in the future at the bottom of the screen we have different categories to choose from and if you swipe up you're going to get some more recommendations of things that you might like the show 8 also has a silk browser so you do have options for things like YouTube and Tik Tok even though they're not native apps you can stream them from this browser and you also have the addition of surfing the web as for music We have options for for Amazon music Spotify Apple music and Pandora and in addition to that you also can listen to radio stations podcasts and audiobooks through audible well as you collect more and more of these Echo devices you can set up things like speaker groups this is going to allow you to connect all of these devices together and play music throughout your whole house on all of these different speakers now to do this we're going to load up up the Alexa app in here we are going to click the devices down here at the bottom and then in the very top right corner there's the plus sign I'm going to tap on that and then at the very bottom we've got combine speakers this is going to allow us to create different groups I'm going to click on that and here are three different types of combinations we can do we can do multi-room music where we just tie these together to listen to music you can do a home theater setup or you can actually set these up as a stereo pair so if you got two devices that you want to have a stere pair you can set it up that way also I'm going to go ahead and go to multi-room music searching for my devices and I've got all of my devices listed here now I am testing two different networks so if I click on say my Echo Show 10 it is going to Mark the ones below as not being usable because it is on a different home network but that's just for me and testing most likely you won't have that issue so I can go ahead and I can select all of my devices right here click on the next button and then it wants me to set up a name so I can pick one of the names here or I can create a custom name at the bottom so let's say I go ahead and click on this top one here this chill out group I go ahead and click on the save button and when I want to play music I can request the music that I want to play and then say play it on my chill out group and that will play that music throughout the house now another cool thing with these music groups too is that you can adjust the volume at different levels in different room so it doesn't have to be say 80% on every device in the room if you want a little quieter in one room you can do that you want a little louder in another room that's an option for you too now as for the speaker on the show 8 I'm quite impressed it can get really loud and sounds great now if you do want to tweak the audio on the device you can go into the settings and adjust the equalizer you can do this either through the app or you can do it directly on the device in the settings here it is going to allow us to adjust the base Miz and travel now if that's not good enough you can connect an external Bluetooth speaker to help improve the audio and allow you to take your music with you whether you're inside or or outside controlling your smart home on this device is a little clunky personally I like going through the app for most of my things but this is a touchscreen so let's take a look at what you can do with your smart home on this device if we scroll down from the top we have a smart home option Now by default this is going to load up all of the privine favorites that we set up in the Alexa app at the top we can scroll through different categories of devices or click on groups clicking on groups is going to bring up the groupings that we created in the app typically these are going to be rooms in the house clicking on a room is going to show you what you have in that room to control if we swipe down from the top again we have the option for selecting routines essentially our routines are going to be our smart home automations that we've created in the app from here we can click the play button to run that routine or we can toggle them on or off now another cool thing that we can do with the show since it has a display is that we can take a look at our Alexa compatible security cameras if you do have multiple security cameras you can swipe down from the top click on your Smart Home tab and then swipe through our top options clicking on cameras this is going to give you a list that is alphabetized on the cameras that you do have now if you have a ring video doorbell you can turn on this really cool feature that allows the video doorbell to automatically pop up a live view if somebody rings that doorbell now because Amazon owns the ring Brand This is a feature that only ring can do if you do have a different brand of video doorbell unfortunately you're not going to be able to turn on that feature for an automatic live view now there are a lot of places that you can put this device throughout the house but let's go through a couple of the different rooms and see what it can do first off let's start with the kitchen having this in the kitchen is going to allow you to look at recipes and cooking videos you can request a recipe for everything show me recipes for chocolate cake now now we have a couple of different options here on the top if you want it to be vegetarian easy 30 minutes or less but we can also scroll through some of the different options here I'm going to go ahead and click on this one the best chocolate cake and we've got several different options now if we see in the picture there is a play button so we can actually play a video to watch we've got the options for Save start add to cart and add to shopping list so we can add the ingredients that we need you can either add it directly to your cart to purchase it through Amazon or we can actually add it to our shopping list if we want to go to the store scrolling down a little bit we can see more of our instructions and the ingredients that we're going to need for this recipe now some other useful features in the kitchen are going to be setting timers you can set multiple timers if you need to and also asking for different measurement conversions now taking this device into the bedroom some useful features will be to set up a digital picture frame now I mentioned this earlier but you can use Amazon photos to upload all of your photos to get them over to the device to use as a digital picture frame swiping down from the top we do have that option for photo frame so we can click on that option and it will use the pictures that we have already pre-selected whether it's personal or maybe nature or landscape or whatever you have selected and it will display those on the device another thing that we can do is set up custom alarm so maybe you want to request an alarm to play a certain radio station at a certain time you can set that up and if you have multiple alarms you do have the option of viewing all of your alarms at the same time now another popular feature that you can use in any room of the house is the communication feature you got things like Drop in Announce Call messages show contacts these are all communication features that the Echo Show can do dropping in on another Echo device in your house is going to allow you to set up an audio communication with that device so you can hear what's going on on that side talk to somebody they don't have to answer it it can automatically drop in on that now the the person on the other side will hear a chime they will see a green light bar on their device letting them know that they have a drop in communication now this is a feature you can turn off so you don't have to have it on every device in your house you can turn that off if you don't want to set it up or you can set up things where only people on your friends or family contact list can actually drop in so that is permissions that you do have to give for that feature you can't just have everyone drop in whenever they want to the next thing is doing an announcement on your device so you can say your wake word and say announce it's dinner time and it will go ahead and announce it on every Echo device in your house all right the next communication option is setting up a call now you can set up contacts in and through the Alexa app go in there and it can either pull all of your contacts off of your phone if you want to allow that to happen or you can actually go in and create new contacts now if you want to set up for grandparents or relatives or friends you can do that and that is going to allow your Echo device to make calls from from that device so you can call other people it'll either ring to their phone or it could ring to their Echo device if you want to set that up but that is an option that you can do with these devices too since this does have a camera you can also set up a video call now if the device on the other side does not have a camera the person on the other side will be able to see you but you will not be able to see them if they don't have a camera so do keep that in mind all right I figured this is a good spot to talk about kind of all the other fun random things that this device can do now did you know that this device right here can be used as a security camera meaning that you can actually log into the camera from your phone and see what's going on on the other side now to do that we're going to load up the app on our phone we're going to click devices down here at the bottom and then let's see here we've got my echo show8 third generation I'm going to tap on that and then kind of in the middle right here we see volume drop in uh the little Moon that's going to be for do not disturb and then we've got our camera option right there so I'm going to go ahead and click on that camera option and it's going to bring it up on my device right here now I got a popup on the device that says a household member is viewing your camera so the person knows somebody is watching and then I've got that green bar down here on the bottom but if we take a look at my phone right here you can see that I am viewing what is going on on that camera so this thing is pretty awesome to be able to use as a security camera to see what's going on now keep in mind this is just for live view only it does not record any footage it doesn't save anything to a cloud it is only for viewing live view of what's going on now another thing that we can do with this device is we can view our calendars on here we can also view our reminders so if we have any reminders on there they can be reviewed on this device too if you want you can ask for Drive times to a specific location now this is not going to give you turn BYT instructions but it will give you traffic updates and times to get to whatever location you are going to now another thing we can use this device for is shopping because this is an Amazon product it is connected to your Amazon Prime account so we can request things to be purchased directly on here so for example buy coffee this is going to bring up a bunch of options for us to choose from we can add it to our cart and purchase it directly on the device another thing that we can do is we can add different items to our shopping list so maybe we need to add salt to our list this will put it on a list that we can access from our phones so when we go shopping we can see what we need another thing that you can do is check nutritional facts maybe you're about to go out to eat and you want to see what the calorie count is going to be on the food you're going to have how many days till summer summer starts in 5 months in 3 weeks on Thursday June 20th 2024 give me a sports update today the Browns will play the Jets in the Thursday night football game at 5:15 p.m. on Amazon Prime video now the Echo Show 8 is jammed packed with features we didn't dive much into the Alexa app but there is so much more that you can do through that and as awesome as this device is there are some features that you're going to want to turn off privacy things and that is why I recommend you guys checking out this video right here on seven things that you need to turn off on your Echo device right now if this video is helpful give it a thumbs up and let me know that you liked it as always don't forget to subscribe for more content like this and I will see you guys in the next video [Music] oh

Channel: Steve DOES

Views: 63,249

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Id: KooCVQ2_pfM

Length: 17min 32sec (1052 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 29 2023