How to Use Alexa's "Adaptive Volume" Feature to Beat Ambient Noise

We’ll take a closer look at the great Alexa feature and explain how to enable it.

Have you ever had trouble understanding Amazon's Alexa because the virtual assistant wasn’t talking loud enough?

Amazon understands this concern and has enabled Adaptive Volume. This new feature can help ensure you understand what Alexa is saying no matter what’s going on in your home at the time. Let's take a look at what the feature is and how to enable it.

Understand Alexa as Well as It Understands You

Alexa is pretty good at understanding you. You can shout to the assistant while your music is playing. Sometimes you may trip over your words or cough in the middle of your sentence, but you can keep talking.

Amazon's offering will usually discern your voice and what you intended to say. Sometimes though, it’s hard to understand the responses. If you’re like most people, you live in an environment that can be noisy. You may have children, or you may need to ask Alexa a question while you’re watching TV and the volume is high.

Turning Up Alexa’s Volume

Manually controlling Alexa’s volume can be tricky, even with voice commands. You can say “Alexa, turn up the volume,” but you may find that the responses still aren’t loud enough.

Related: Alexa Voice Commands Everyone Should Know

You can walk over and use the physical volume buttons on your Echo device, but this isn’t practical every time the dog barks. Amazon has been working on this problem, and Adaptive Volume can help ensure you will understand Alexa’s responses even in a noisy environment. Just to note, the feature is only currently available in the United States.

Enabling Adaptive Volume

Say “Alexa, turn on adaptive volume,” and Alexa will respond with something like, “I can now speak louder when I detect ambient noise.” If you’d prefer, you can also use the Alexa app for iOS or Android to enable Adaptive Volume:

1. In the Alexa home screen, tap More
2. Tap Settings
3. Scroll down to Alexa Preferences
4. Tap Voice Responses
5. Tap to enable Adaptive Volume

Turn It Up

Go ahead and turn up your music volume and try it out. As with any new software update, you may find that Adaptive Volume could use some improvement.

Hopefully, it will work better as Amazon's technology improves, but it may be a worthwhile solution for the time being.

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