- Today, I'm going to show you how to connect your Roku
to your
and honestly, why you might not want to do that.
So let's dive in.
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Now, like I said
I'm going to be showing you how to connect your Roku
to your
and I am going to be talking about her quite a bit.
So, if you have one in the room,
go ahead and hit that mute button on your Alexa device
so that I don't keep giving her instructions
throughout this video.
Okay. So what we're going to do, first of all
is get on your smartphone that has the Alexa app.
We're going to open that app up.
From here there are a lot of ways
to get to where we want to go.
What I'm going to show you
is going to this More section at the bottom right.
And then you go to Settings.
Right here under Alexa Preferences, you'll see TV and video.
This is going to show you a bunch of featured skills.
Luckily, Roku is pretty high on the list.
So I'm going to press that plus sign
and get in here to the Roku skill and enable to use.
From there it's going to ask you
to log into your Roku account.
If you haven't set one up yet
you should do that when you set up your Roku device.
And so, hopefully you already have one.
Go ahead and enter your email address and password there.
I am not a robot.
At least that's the rumor.
We sign in from there.
Connect your eligible Roku devices to Alexa.
Yes, I do want to do that.
And then it's going to ask you to choose
which Roku device you're trying to connect.
If you only have one, great.
I've tested a lot over the years
and so I'm going to go ahead
and set up my studio TV on this one
and link it to the Alexa app.
Automatically link Roku devices?
In this case, I don't really want to do that.
I have too many devices floating around.
You may want to.
But alright.
So now we're going to continue to the Alexa app.
Your Roku account has been successfully linked.
So, that's it.
You don't even have to go onto your Roku device.
It will do it all here in the Alexa for you.
Okay. Choose the device you'd like to control.
Yep. That's my Studio TV.
We will continue with that.
Which devices do I want to be able to control that?
This is important.
I've got a lot of Echo devices around the house
but I really only want my Echo Studio,
the one behind me, to be able to control the TV.
So I will link those devices together.
Alright. There we go.
Now, as I mentioned at the beginning of the video,
you may not actually want to do this.
I still do it honestly, because there are some conveniences.
But it doesn't give you the functionality
that you might think you're going to get.
What it does do for you,
is it allows you to turn on and off the TV.
It allows you to turn up the volume,
maybe set a specific TV volume or mute it.
You can open up some apps.
They've got a hundred apps that they say are available
for Alexa to turn on, on your Roku.
But the problem,
the big problem comes in navigating content.
There's no good way to navigate through Roku menus
using your voice commands with Alexa.
So, if you are trying to do that,
you can't tell her to move left, move right, select this,
you know, back out of that.
You can tell her to open up certain apps
or turn on and off the TV like I said,
but not much more than that.
So like I said, I've got my Roku attached to my Alexa
but I don't try to do anything fancy with it.
This is mostly if I'm already out of the room
and I have forgotten to turn off the TV
I can just yell at Alexa to do it.
Or if my kids have been watching for too long
and I want her to turn the TV off for them
I can have her do that. You know?
So there are little things like that that are convenient,
but you're not going to be able
to do a lot of the stuff that you might want to.
If you do want to be able to do that stuff,
what you probably should go for
is a different TV device instead of a Roku.
If you are an Alexa household
go for an Amazon Firestick.
The functionality there is a lot more seamless
as you can imagine.
Or if you really like the new Google Chromecast,
then you know,
maybe consider going with a Google Assistant instead.
My point here is just that the Roku Alexa pairing is nice
but it's not as powerful as you might expect.
So if you have any comments or questions on how this works
go ahead and hit the comments below.
I'll be glad to field some of those down there.
Don't forget to give this video
a like and subscribe if you enjoyed what you saw.
Thanks for watching everybody.
I will see you next time.