When your baby cries, you’re looking to soothe their angst as quickly as possible. Crying is how babies communicate their needs. As a parent, you’re ready to respond—but did you know you can get a little assistance from AI? From the moment your baby starts crying, Alexa can comfort your baby until you're able to get to their crib.
We're going to show you how to use Alexa’s Soothe Baby routine to calm your crying baby by playing lullabies, giving baby (and you) peace of mind.
What Is Alexa's Soothe Baby Routine?
Alexa has many helpful pre-programmed routines that can assist you in your day-to-day life, but perhaps none so helpful to parents as the Soothe Baby routine.
This is a feature of Amazon’s virtual assistant that, when enabled, detects the sound of your crying baby by using advanced audio analysis technology. Once your baby’s cries are detected, Alexa plays a preset playlist of lullabies or other soothing sounds.
The routine can be customized with your own playlist of favorite lullabies or sounds, and you can set the volume to the exact level that's perfect for your baby's delicate ears.
If you have a baby monitor with a camera to check on your little one, there may be some cases where Alexa soothes them back to sleep without you having to get up at all, such as when sleep training.
How to Set Up the Soothe Baby Routine for Your Alexa Devices
You can set up the Soothe Baby routine in the Alexa app on your smartphone. To do this:
- Open the Alexa app and select the More tab at the bottom.
- Tap Routines.
- Tap Family.
- Scroll down and select the Soothe Baby routine.
- Once there, customize the Name, When Alexa responds, and what Alexa Will do when your baby starts crying.
- Enable via the Complete Setup prompt.
The customization begins with naming the routine—you can name it after your baby, such as “Soothe Cole”, or a more generic way, like “Lullabies.”
Set the conditions under which the routine will trigger. The default is every day from 9pm to 6am and suppress for 30 minutes, but you can choose different days of the week and shift the timeframe.
The routine can start as soon as Alexa hears your baby crying, or after it’s detected the sound for a specific amount of time.
What if your baby isn’t much for lullabies, and instead likes to drift off to sleep to the sounds of The Black Keys or Metallica? We all have our preferences. You can set that command, too.
By default, it’s set to Instrumental lullabies, but you can select an alternative from My Library or use a service like Amazon Music, Apple Music, or Spotify (you need to link your music provider to Alexa before setting up the routine.) Simply change the command to a song, band, or the playlist you want to trigger.
The Smart Solution for Soothing Your Baby
Modern life is tricky and becoming a parent adds many more layers of complexity. To simplify, Alexa offers a smart solution to parents like you to take the edge off when your baby awakens from slumber and needs some comforting.
The Soothe Baby routine gives you peace of mind, leading to a happier life for you and your child. And if you're looking to squeeze even more time out of your day, there are plenty of routines to take advantage of.