Amazon enabled Follow-up Mode in Australia for Alexa powered speakers today, nine months after the feature debuted in the USA.
The feature allows multiple questions to be asked in a row without saying “Alexa / Echo” each time. It was announced via Amazon’s What’s New With Alexa newsletter.
Follow-Up mode has to be enabled per device one by one, it cannot be applied to all your Amazon Alexa powered speakers in one go.
While this a bit tedious, it also means you can keep this mode off for speakers that are near areas in your home where they might get confused by hearing multiple conversations.
Alexa doesn’t remain active to answer more questions in the following situations:
- Audio is playing. For example, the device is playing music.
- You end the conversation with Alexa. For example, you can say, “Stop,” “Cancel,” “Go to sleep,” or “Thank you.”
- Alexa is not confident you’re speaking to her. For example, if she detects that speech was background noise or that the intent of the speech was not clear.
To enable this new feature you need to use the Alexa app on your phone/tablet, go to the menu, open Settings, then tap the device you want to enable, scroll down and enable Follow-up mode. Once enabled that device will keep listening for about 5 seconds after finishing answering a question, in case you ask a follow up.
I tested it with the following commands on my Echo Spot and Follow-up mode worked flawlessly.
“Alexa, What’s the UV index? … what about Saturday? … What about Sunday”
“What’s Australia’s cricket score? … Who’s playing in the Australian Open tonight?”
We encourage you to try out Follow-up Mode on your own Amazon Echo Alexa speakers and let us know in the comments how well it works.
Interesting this was enabled automatically for my 4 devices (2 x dot, 1 spot, 1 first gen Alexa)