Amazon has been pushing a lot of updates for Firestick lately. A few weeks back, they introduced a whole bunch of new Alexa commands for your Firestick like - controlling Netflix on your Firestick from your Echo Dot, skipping YouTube videos, or adding stuff to your shopping list directly from your TV and much more. If you haven’t already checked that out, click on this video on YouTube cards after watching this one.

Recently, Amazon has announced that it’ll bring Alexa routines to Fire TV devices, which basically lets users bundle a couple of Alexa commands that can be executed together with one voice command. Let me show you how.

So, say, I'm watching The Boys on my Firestick and I want to get some popcorn, So, I will say, “Alexa, break time,” Alexa will acknowledge my command, pause your Fire TV content and turn on your smart lights. 

Similarly, when I come back, I’ve created a routine, “Alexa, movie time” Alexa will say “welcome back,” turn off your smart lights, and resume the show.

Now, that’s just one example of routines you can create with Alexa. The possibilities are endless, for example, you can create a routine when you hear a doorbell while watching a movie on your Firestick. Alexa will stop the playback, automatically switch to your security camera to show you who is on the door. Like we said, possibilities are endless and the smarter devices you have, the better this gets.

So, how do you create these routines on your Firestick, you ask? Make sure you press the subscribe button if you like to stay updated with Firestick and pretty much all streaming devices. With that out of the way, here’s how to set up your personalized routines that you can use with the Alexa and your Firestick.

First, you need to download the Alexa app from the App Store. And then open it and connect all your smart home devices like your Echo Dot, Firestick and smart lights to your Alexa account. Make sure all your smart gadgets are under same Alexa account and the same Wi-Fi, for this to work. For more info on how to connect them, check out our previous videos.

Once you have everything setup, tap on the More option from the bottom navigation.

Select Routines from the menu.

Now, here you can create your own routines. I’ve created few of them myself, which I’ll delete and then show you from scratch.

To build your own routine, go to the Routines section and tap the + button in the top right corner. From here you need to specify three things, name, the trigger command and the series of actions.

So, for name, let’s say “Break time” and tap on Next. 

And when this happens, I want this to get activated when I say a voice command to my Echo Dot placed next to TV, so I’ll select Voice option and the command could be anything like “Break time”. Then, save the changes. 

Under Actions, the first thing I want to do is turn on the smart lights in the TV room. So, tap on the plus sign and go to Smart Home, there you will find all your smart lights that you have connected with the Alexa app. Select the one you want, and tap on next, here you have options to turn it on/off, change the brightness level or change color. I like to keep things simple, so I just power ON the smart light. And then save the changes.

Next things I want is, Alexa should respond with some message so that I know, it got my command, so again tap on plus icon and select Alexa says, and set a customized message on whatever you want. Bonus point if you think of something quirky.

And the final thing I want Alexa to do is to pause the playback on my Firestick. So, again tap on the plus sign, select Fire TV, if you have multiple Firestick, choose the one you want to pause in this setup, like in my case Smart DNS Proxy Firestick and then under Action, you can either pause, resume or navigate to home screen, etc.; for this instance, I want to pause the playback, tap on Next to save the changes.

Now, the final step is to save this routine. To do so, tap on the Save option on the top right, and you will notice that it’ll ask from where do you want to executive this command. In my case, I want to do this with the Echo Dot 4 I have next to my TV, so I’ll choose the Smart DNS Proxy Echo Dot from the list. And that’s it. Go back to save the changes. 

Now, let’s put it test to see if it actually works. Tap on the Play button next to Break time, and there you go.

Now, let’s set the reverse routine that will do the opposite of it. 

So, the steps are pretty much the same, tap on the plus sign on the top right, and give a name to your routine. Remember that the name of a routine has nothing to do with the routine invoke command and both could be different from each other. 

Once you give it a name like “Movie time”, I want the Alexa command to be - Alexa, movie time. And then save changes. 

Now for actions, I want to reverse everything that I did in the previous routine, so, I’ll start by turning off the lights and then make Alexa say “welcome back” and, finally, resume the Firestick playback. 

Save changes, and again, I want all of these commands to be done on Smart DNS Proxy Echo Dot placed next to my TV. Save change and go back.

Again, let’s put it test to see if it actually works. Tap on the Play button next to Movie time, and it works just as well.

So, there you go, that’s how you setup routines for the Fire TV stick. I use the “Break time” and “Movie time” quite a lot. What about you guys? Let us know in the comments what cool routines you are planning to set up on your Firestick. And speaking of cool stuff, check out Smart DNS Proxy if you’re keen to unblock geo-restricted content either on your Fire TV stick or any other streaming device that you have. There’s a 14-day free trial so you can test the waters and then see how you like it.

Thank you for reading and watching and see you in the next one.