Amazon Widget Adds Alexa To iOS Home Screens

One of the newer features of iOS 14 is the ability to add widgets to the Home screen. This is more useful than Apple’s previous implementation and if you’re looking to get more use out of it, you might be interested to learn that Amazon’s Alexa app has been updated where it now supports widgets.

What this means is that if you so desire, you could actually add Alexa to your Home screen via a widget. According to Amazon, “On iOS 14 or higher, you can now add the new Ask Alexa widget to your home screen and tap to talk to Alexa.” It should be noted that as far as digital assistants are concerned, Siri is the only one that you can summon regardless of what app you’re using.

While putting Alexa on your Home screen as a widget won’t let you summon it using the, “Hey Alexa” command, it will make it easier for you to tap on it and make requests to it. Given that different smart home devices work with different digital assistants, we imagine that you might own some that are Alexa-only, so having Alexa on your Home screen will make it easier for you to interact with it and control your smart home.

Apple is expected to improve on its widgets by adding support for more of it in iOS 15. The update doesn’t have a set release date yet but it will most likely be launching this fall.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Cellphones
Tags: Alexa, Amazon, iOS