Gadgetory

what's up guys wanna hear from Andrew 30 and back when the HTC u 11 was first announced one of the more interesting features that was announced alongside the U 11 was the support for Amazon's Alexa and this was not initially available when the phone first went on sale but it's available starting today July 17th in the Google Play Store so if you have u 11 you'll be able to download it and we have a pre-release version of Alexa on the u 11 so let's go ahead and check it out and see what Alexa is like on the HTC u11 alright so before we dive into the functionality and everything that Alexa can do on the U 11 let's just take a look at the actual app itself so the app is called HTC Alexa and that's probably so you don't confuse it with the Amazon Alexa app and these two apps actually do work in conjunction with one another and you'll sort of know what I mean as we dive a little bit deeper let's just open up the app here so as I open it up it pops up from the bottom screen and essentially just takes up the bottom third of the display it's not a full screen app and when you open it it automatically just starts listening for your voice if you don't want it to do that you can just mute the microphone by tapping the microphone icon in the upper left corner and hit OK and just tap it again to unmute there's a couple other options here you have an info button and this will tell you other commands or questions that you can try with Alexa and this is really useful if you've never used Alexa before at all and if you swipe down in your notification shade you'll notice it offers even more suggestions that you can try and I assume that these will eventually go away the more you use the service I just think I haven't used it quite enough just yet for that to happen we'll go ahead and jump back here and check out these settings for the app because there are a few settings so you can change the language here English is the only option and you can also enable or disable the Alexa keyword and you can also use the Alexa keyword when the screen is off if you want and you can also tie Alexa to edgesense so if I squeeze the phone I can actually open up Alexa just by squeezing and you can see Alexa launches there there's a couple other options at the bottom you can jump directly into the Amazon Alexa you have it and you can also manage your account by logging in and out as far as what you can do with Alexa on the u11 the experience is pretty much the same as what you would get on an echo or an echo dot you can pretty much ask it all the same questions or commands even ones that require a skill now there are some limitations and we'll go over what those are but for now let's just go ahead and ask you some questions and see what it's like and we'll start with some basic ones and sort of work our way up Alexa what's the weather in Kansas City it's 89 degrees with cloudy skies tonight you can look for thunderstorms with a low of 71 degrees Alexa what's the tallest building in the world the tallest building is Burj Khalifa no relation to Wiz Khalifa okay that was a really bad joke scratch that Alexa buy me paper towel the top search result for paper towels is boundary white paper towels 12 huge rolls it's 23 dollars and 85 cents total including tax after a discount of $2 say tell me more to hear details would you like to buy it no thank you Alexa turn off office okay Alexa turn on office okay Alexa play jeopardy let's check it away the first category is we're talking baseball an ESPN article named this former Cardinals 2012 deal with the Angels as the worst contract in baseball who is Albert Pujols yes that's it the second category is avian poetry love and constancy is dead this mythical bird and the turtle fled in a mutual flame from hand I don't know please respond alright so I think you guys get the point but I did mention there are some limitations and one of those limitations is that you can't make calls or messages directly from the HSE Alexa app and if you try to do that it will just refer you to Amazon's Alexa app instead and that sort of makes sense because that's one of the purposes of that app but it does feel a little bit convoluted and not all that intuitive another limitation that you might have notice is that there's no visual elements so even though this is Alexa on your phone and your phone has a screen there's no links no text 10 no photos and this is not a comparison video to Google assistant that is definitely one area where Google assistant has the advantage because when it comes to things like movie show times or restaurant recommendations it's a lot easier and faster when you actually have visual elements to interact with versus just listening to Alexa read everything off and if it does have a visual Elle it will again just refer you to the Amazon Alexa app instead so that's really it for Alexa on the u11 I think it will only get better with software updates and it's pretty cool to have Alexa everywhere you go and if you have a you 11 definitely check it out on the Google Play Store but that's it for this video guys thank you so much for watching I hope you all found it helpful if you did please give it a thumbs up down below we definitely appreciate it subscribe to the channel which is also down below and hit that notification bell while you're at it so you don't miss out on future videos and check us out on social media instagram twitter snapchat google+ all that good stuff we linked down below and check out the website as well and Jordan thorny calm because we are your source for all things Android