Amazon Echo's intelligent assistant, Alexa, just got about a hundred times cooler with a new feature called "Petlexa." With Petlexa, your dogs, cats, hamsters, gerbils, snakes, lizards, kangaroos, pandas, koalas, jellyfish, sea urchins, lions, tigers, and bears can communicate with the smart assistant!
With Petlexa your dog can use the Amazon Echo, Dot, or Tap to order its own food from Amazon; your cat can turn on its favorite Beethoven Symphony and kick back with a little catnip; your pet raccoon can use Alexa's smart home controls to have a house party while you're away; your snake can listen to the latest episode of Serial … basically, the possibilities are just as endless for your pet as they are for you.
A word of warning before you go enabling this feature: I flipped the switch and my dogs instantly took to barking out Amazon orders for treats, toys, and overstuffed microfiber velvet pet beds. When I told them they needed to cool it on ordering stuff to the house, they waited until I was in the shower and had Alexa turn off the lights on me. 🙄 Put simply: If you've got spoiled pets, you might want to have a chat with them before you give them power over your home and your Amazon account.
Amazon says it's still working out some language parsing for cold-blooded animals, so it might be best to hold off telling your pet reptile until they've got everything figured out. Nothing worse than an angry snake griping about how "no one ever undersssstandsssss" it.
You can ask Alexa, "What is Petlexa?" to learn more about the new feature. I've included a video of me doing just that. Super helpful for learning all the keywords!
