Amazon Brings Expanded Alexa Support To Fire TV Devices: Here's What's New

Amazon announced today that it's expanding Alexa hands-free support on Fire TV devices. Fire TV has offered Alexa compatibility for a number of years now, but today, Alexa users are getting a few new tricks. Not only are they getting more options for voice navigation, but Amazon says they'll be getting an "Echo Show-like experience" as well.

What does that mean? Essentially, users will be able to treat their TV as if it were an Echo Show and use Alexa voice commands to pull up certain skills. For instance, Alexa will begin to show visual responses to queries on the display your Fire TV is connected to, allowing you to pull up weather forecasts, feeds from connected cameras, and to-do lists using voice commands.

Perhaps more useful to a larger number of Fire TV users is the expanded support for voice controls. Specifically, Amazon is beefing up search and navigation through voice commands, which basically means that you can do more without a remote. Users can ask Alexa to search for certain content and navigate through those search results, or even jump to specific features like your watch list.

So, while this isn't a massive update, it's got some useful new features coming along with it. Expanding support for voice commands further will be nice to see for Alexa users who also own a Fire TV device, and by now it seems like users can probably navigate through most – if not all – of the Fire TV interface using only voice commands.

Amazon says that the new update is shipping out to Fire TV and Alexa users over the coming week, so keep an eye out for it to land. While this new functionality is compatible with most Alexa and Fire TV devices, Amazon does note that it ironically isn't compatible with Echo Show or Echo Spot yet, so users of those devices will have to sit this new functionality out for now.