If you use Amazon Alexa, you will soon no longer be able to use this popular service!
If you use an Amazon Alexa, you will lose this service on November 8 – many are disappointed!
Users who rely on Alexa will soon no longer be able to access the service
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From setting your alarm to help you get up in the morning to reading the weather before you head out the door, Amazon Alexa has become an integral part of our daily lives. Since 2017, more than 87 million smart devices have been installed in homes, offices, and other spaces, with nearly half of those devices using Alexa, according to Statista. Unfortunately, that means about 46.5 million devices will lose an important service come November 8. Read on to find out what you won’t be able to do with an Amazon Alexa device starting Monday.
Amazon Alexa will reportedly no longer have access to your email starting November 8
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If you use your Amazon Alexa to check your email, you might be disappointed in a few days. Amazon has informed its customers that Alexa’s access to emails will be turned off. This is according to an email from the Amazon Alexa team that was shared by users on Reddit and Twitter. This change will go into effect on November 8, according to the email.
“This means you will no longer be able to link your Gmail or Microsoft email account to Alexa to search or manage your email, and any linked email accounts will be automatically unlinked,” the email says. Best Life has reached out to Amazon for confirmation, but has yet to hear back.
This change will also affect some email-related features.
However, you won’t just lose the ability to have Alexa read your emails to you. According to the Amazon Alexa email, the change will also affect other features related to your emails, like email routines and email notifications. However, if you have a calendar account linked to Alexa, it will continue to work.
“Also, we will no longer support email package tracking if you’ve opted in to receive updates from merchants outside of Amazon. However, you can still ask ‘Alexa, where’s my stuff?” to stay up to date on upcoming Amazon deliveries,” the email update reads.
Users have already been able to have Alexa read their emails to them since 2018.
According to CNBC, Alexa gained the ability to read email messages in December 2018. At the time, Amazon supported email accounts from Google Gmail, Microsoft Outlook.com, Hotmail, and Live.com, and gave users the ability to ask Alexa to read their latest emails aloud, delete an email, or respond to an email using voice only.
“Some of your contacts and email messages are stored in the cloud to provide the service. This information is encrypted and stored securely on Amazon’s servers. Amazon does not read a person’s email unless the person asks us to or we need to read it for security or compliance reasons, such as to investigate an error or abuse,” an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC at the time.
And after nearly four years of functionality, some Alexa users are more than frustrated with the sudden elimination of the service. “Alexa just discontinued email integration. I got a lot of use out of it and this feels like a rare step backwards,” wrote one Twitter user on November 2.
But similar devices won’t have access to email either
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Alexa won’t be the only smart home device that won’t have access to email. Google’s own smart voice assistant, the Google Home, hasn’t been able to read emails and text messages for some time, according to Smart Home Point. According to the smart home news outlet, this may be due to privacy concerns, although other third-party devices, like Alexa, have offered this service for years.
“For the longest time, it was Alexa that could access my workgroup’s (GSUITE) email and calendar, while Google Home itself couldn’t yet,” one Twitter user acknowledged. Another noted, “Amazon is removing Alexa email updates. Amazing that neither Google Home nor Alexa are able to read email. A technology that has been around since 1998. I wonder how visually impaired people will cope.”