How to Control Your Roku With Amazon Alexa
I have a Roku TV attached to the wall above my desktop computer – which is bound to kill me one day here in earthquake-prone California – and I always have to go through heaps of stuff to find the remote. Of course, I could turn it on with the universal remote control, but it’s all across the room.
If you are as lazy as me and you also have an Amazon Echo device (or have Alexa connected to your desktop PC ), you will be thrilled to know that you no longer need to use the remote to control your computer. TV or streaming device. Alexa is happy to do it for you if you take advantage of her new Roku skill .
To install it, open the Alexa app (or visit the online Alexa Skills portal). Then in the app, you can visit the Skills & Games section in the sidebar and search for Roku, or you can go to Settings and then TV & Videos to open it even faster. You will need to sign in with your Roku credentials – and hopefully you are already signed in to your Roku account on whatever Roku devices you use. You will then select the Roku device you want to pair with Alexa.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll want to give a few minutes to play out part of the device discovery process. After a while, you can visit the Devices section of your Alexa app to assign a paired Roku device to a room. It’s not necessary for you to control it with your voice, but it does make it easier to create subroutines later – if you want to go crazy with automation.
In terms of voice commands, here are some examples of what you can now tell your TV (via Alexa):
- “… Turn on the Roku TV” (“Turn on the TV” worked for me too.)
- “… turn up the volume on Roku”
- “… set the volume to ‘#’ on the Roku .”
- “… no sound on Roku”
- “… switch to channel” # “on Roku”
- “… switch to HDMI 2 / other connection type on Roku”
- “… pause on Rock”
- “… fast forward to Roku”
- “… rewind back to Roku”
- “… launch Prime Video / Netflix / the app of your choice on Roku”
- “… go home to Roku”
If you are having trouble getting voice commands to work, make sure you have at least version 8.2 of the Roku software installed on your device. While your device should check (and download) for updates automatically, you can also force it to manually check it . Also, if you are using the Alexa skill with your Roku TV, make sure Fast Startup is enabled so you can turn it on with your voice.
There is also one misunderstanding related to working as intended which has been reported by other users. Namely, you can only pair a Roku skill with one Roku device. If you have multiple TVs or streaming devices, pick your favorite because you can’t target Alexa commands to specific Roku devices – just one.