How to control your TV with Alexa

When it works, controlling your TV with Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant can feel like magic. Using voice commands keeps you from having to thumb through menus and lets you get to what you want to watch much faster.

But using Alexa as your TV remote requires a bit of know-how. Alexa won’t understand everything you might want to do, and controlling your actual television and sound system requires specific equipment.

To avoid potential frustration, we’ll go through what you can and can’t do with Alexa on the Fire TV and other television devices, and explain how to set it all up.

FIRE TV AND ALEXA SETUP

With the exception of the first-generation Fire TV Stick, all Fire TV devices include an Alexa remote, which lets you issue voice commands by holding the microphone button at the top. But for hands-free voice commands, or something with Alexa onboard, such as the Sonos Beam soundbar) or a , which has built-in microphones for picking up voice commands.