The Amazon Echo lights up whenever it’s activated, but if yours isn’t within your line of sight, you can enable an audible tone instead. Here’s how.
By default, the Echo doesn’t provide any kind of audio signal before or after you give commands. It’s one of those things that’s really useful, but (for some reason) it’s ever-so-slightly buried within the Alexa app.
Launch the Alexa app on your phone and select the menu button in the top-left corner of the screen.
Select “Settings”.
Select your Echo at the top of the screen (or if you have multiple Echos, select one that you want to enable the feature on).
Select “Sounds & Notifications”.
Under the section “Request Sounds”, select the toggle switch under “Start of Request”. This will emit a short audio tone after you say “Alexa”. You can also turn on “End of Request”, which will play the tone after it recognizes your Alexa command.
You will need to enable this feature manually on each of your Echo devices that you want it enabled on. Most people won’t necessarily need something like this, since they can just watch for the light to turn on, but if you are blind or visually impaired or if your Echo isn’t someplace where you can see it easily, enabling the audio tones is a great way to make sure that Alexa heard you without guessing.
