Check your Alexa History

Your Alexa device can be monitored from your browser or mobile device and you can always verify, compare and improve your spelling while talking with the device. 


In the Amazon app under More -> Activity -> Voice history you can review the voice activity and history of your device to compare what you have said to Alexa with exactly what Alexa understood from your voice commands.


Potential Issues

Most of the time, voice recognition devices are running into problems with utterance samples, acronyms, abbreviations of non-English language words. This is a known issue frequently discussed on Amazon’s developers forum.


For example, if your station happened to be called Hometown Radio, it is better to use the entire naming (the two known English vocabulary words) in Alexa instead of calling it HT Radio. When trying to invoke HT Radio, an issue can occur due to the pronunciation on the "HT" segment which Alexa might not recognize. In this case, if you opt to use capitalized letters as part of your station name, try adding a pause (DOT) after each letter when you are spelling: H.T. Radio.


In the end it is an ongoing challenge, a continuous improvement process, on how you train the Alexa engine for better understanding your request. Due to the machine learning systems in the Amazon Alexa system, the incremental success rates will make it so that more listeners are able to invoke your station on the first try.


Recommendations and Fixes

Here are our suggestions and potential fixes for you to consider if your listeners encounter issues with calling your Live365 station through Amazon Alexa:

  • Regularly monitor and compare the voice history on Alexa (what you spell versus what the device understands from you).
  • Use known English words in your station naming.
  • Rename your Live365 station into something easy for Alexa to understand for testing. You will need to wait around 15-30 minutes once you rename your station to process the station name and check again.


These recommendations can help in most cases but this is not an exhaustive list of fixes for Alexa Issues. If you have tried all of the above and are still having issuesplease open a support ticket.