Amazon Echo owners, you’re getting a nifty new feature today.
Amazon is now rolling out multi-room audio support for the Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Show. This means that you can sync your music playback between devices to play songs throughout your home.
To start, multi-room audio is supported on songs from Amazon Music, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, and Pandora. Support for Spotify and SiriusXM is coming soon.
Echo device owners can enable multi-room audio by launching the Alexa app on their phone and creating groups of two or more Echo devices by naming the group something like “upstairs”. You’ll then say something like “Alexa, play Hootie and the Blowfish upstairs” and playback on your Echo devices will begin.
Multi-room audio is a pretty nice new feature for folks that own multiple Echo devices. Now you can start playing music on one device, then move to another room in your house and keep listening to the same song, all without having to carry a speaker or headphones with you or anything complicated like that.
If you’d like to add an Amazon Echo or two to your house to take advantage of this new multi-room audio feature, you can now score a discounted Echo Dot for $44.99 or an Echo Show for $229.99. The Amazon Echo is currently sold out, but there are refurbished models available for $129.99, $50 off the price of a new Echo.
Amazon today also announced Connected Speaker APIs, which will let owners of any Alexa-enabled device control music playback on connected audio systems. Amazon is working with companies like Sonos, Bose, Sound United, and Samsung on this feature.
