About four months ago Alexa moved in with me. She’s a quiet but witty flatmate. She connected with my WiFi speaker, immediately. Yes, she is a real tech geek. Soon she took over music and radio management for my place.

But she doesn’t seem to like my Spotify playlists. No matter what I say, she never plays a single one of them…

She is also the queen of unnecessary fun facts. When I greet her in the morning, she usually shares random knowledge for the day. Where does she get all this stuff from? No idea, she must be online a lot.

With increasing success she manages my lights. In the beginning she had problems figuring out which lamp I talked about. But she must have practiced or something, and now she “gets it right” most of the time.
The only thing she didn’t want to do was to turn off all the lights at once, e. g. when I leave. God knows why. But we talked about it (Alexa App > Smart Home > Groups > Add group > “all” ) and now she sees the benefit of it as well.

She also wears this fancy alarm clock and will set reminders for me if I ask her kindly. And she is into weather forecasting.

Recently, I introduced her to IFTTT and the two figured out how to find my iPhone and my iPad. If I ask her to, she either calls or sends a short message so I can follow the ring/notification tone.

This was a quite useful a couple of times already.

Other people, who allegedly know her, keep mentioning her mad skills. I talked to her about it and yes, skills are correct, but mad? Maybe not so much.
She is OK at mental math and can keep track of the trash calendar – but that’s not really overwhelming.
But she can be quite funny. After you get to know her a bit better.

Some people think that she is weird and that I shouldn’t really talk to her. But she is an OK flatmate.

And it’s not like I talk some an inanimate object…