Amazon Echo is a fantastic tool for using your voice to manage everything from shopping lists to music playlists, but what if there are other people in your family? Read on to see how to link multiple Amazon accounts to Echo for shared music, lists, and more.
Why do I want to do this?
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If you are the only one in your family and/or the only person to shop through Amazon, then this guide is probably not for you (but you may still find that a few profiles are helpful for your family or roommates, so we we encourage you to keep reading).
For people with multi-person households, especially if all members of that household have purchased different content on Amazon, such as music and audio books, it makes sense to enable shared profiles so that you can, for example, play songs and albums through the Echo system. what your spouse or roommate bought.
In addition to sharing music, you can also share shopping lists, to-do lists, calendar entries, and other useful features available on the Echo/Alexa system, perfect for making sure that whoever makes the purchase has full access to everything added to the collective shopping list. and other general household chores.
Note. One small caveat to note: giving someone access through shared profiles also gives them access to the purchasing power of your Amazon Echo. You can disable voice purchases (or enable PIN) in the Settings section of the Amazon Alexa app.
Adding a profile to your Amazon Echo
Let’s see how to add a profile to Amazon Echo. You can complete all of these steps either using the Amazon Alexa app on your smart device or by visiting echo.amazon.com by logging into your Echo primary user’s Amazon account. For readability and enlarged screenshots, we chose to use echo.amazon.com for the tutorial, but the menu layout and function are identical.
To get started, navigate to the menu by pressing the menu button on the Amazon Alexa app, or by simply loading the echo.amazon.com portal. Select «Settings» from the sidebar and then select «Household Profile».
You will be prompted to provide a summary of the Amazon Household system and ask if you would like to continue. Select «Continue» once you have read the summary.
You will then be prompted to transfer the device or computer to another person, as shown above. After you click OK, they will need to enter their Amazon login credentials in order to authorize their addition to Amazon Echo.
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Once their credentials have been verified, they will be presented with a brief overview of the Amazon Echo/Alexa sharing experience, which covers everything that will be transferred (music, audiobooks, calendars, and to-do lists and shared shopping). After reading the summary and information about Alexa voice processing and data collection, select «Join Household» to complete the process. You will see a confirmation process welcoming you to the family of the primary account holder.
While it looks like you’re all done here, there’s one last step before the process officially ends. The user you just added to your echo needs to either download and install the Amazon Alexa app on their smart device (recommended step, no matter what it is) or go to echo.amazon.com by logging into their Amazon account so they can accept the Alexa Voice Assistant terms and conditions. Until they agree to the user agreement, their profile will not be available on Echo and all commands associated with the profile will be greeted with an invitation to the user to accept the terms of service.
Now that we’ve invited a user, set up profile sharing, and accepted the terms of service, it’s time to take a look at how to actually use multiple profiles in Echo.
Switching between profiles
Once you’ve completed all the steps in the previous section, it’s easy to switch between profiles. When using commands related to the profile system, you can use the word «account» or «profile» interchangeably, since Alexa answers both terms. We prefer to use «profile» as it aligns most naturally with the function of the profile system in the Echo.
First, if you’re not sure which profile you’re currently on, you can say:
Alexa, whose profile is this?
In turn, you will get a response like «In Jason’s profile». You can then switch between profiles in one of two ways:
Alexa, switch profiles.
Alexa, switch to profile [Имя].
If there are only two links to Amazon accounts on echo, you can use «switching profiles». If you have multiple accounts associated with Echo, then it’s much faster to switch profiles by name, like «switch to Steve’s profile».
Once you’ve changed profiles, you can use all the commands you would normally use when communicating with Alexa, but the commands will have access to the content of the currently active profile. (Thus, if your spouse or roommate is a huge music fan who does all the music buying, you’ll want to switch to their profile when using the Echo as a jukebox).
Deleting a profile from your Amazon Echo
If a member leaves your household or you just decide to remove them from the device for other reasons, this is easy to do. To remove a household member from your Amazon Echo, simply open the Amazon Alexa app or visit echo.amazon.com as we did in the first step.
We want to highlight one element of this process: once you remove someone from your Amazon household, you won’t be able to re-add them for 180 days. If you delete someone by mistake, you will need to contact the Amazon Support Center to get them back into the account as you will no longer be able to add them manually.
With that in mind, let’s consider deleting someone (if you’re sure you want to delete them).
When you return to the «Settings» section and scroll down to the place where we originally found «Household Profile», you will find an entry that reads «In an Amazon household with [Имя]». Select this entry.
You will be prompted to re-authorize your Amazon credentials, and then the screen shown above will appear, allowing you to select and then remove another user.
In addition to deleting users, users you add can also delete themselves by repeating the steps above. (So if you found this tutorial because you’re trying to remove yourself from your roommate’s Alexa device, you can repeat the steps above and select «Keep» next to your name instead to start the removal process yourself.)
Do you have a burning question about Amazon Echo or Alexa voice assistant? Send us an email at ask@.com and we’ll try to answer it.
