How to Turn off Alexa

Alexa or Amazon Alexa is an Amazon developed virtual assistant. It is programmed for voice recognition and interaction, setting timers and alarms, music playback and streaming with Amazon Music or Spotify, playing audio books, and providing tailored news reports of weather, sports, entertainment. Alexa also has the ability to control several smart devices including smart lights, connected appliances using itself as a home automation system. But there may be sometimes you just do not want to have the device active.

It appears that there is no way to turn off Alexa by voice at this time the reason why Amazon deliberately does not support this yet may be because Alexa could run on many different devices; some devices are push-to-talk, some devices are tap-to-talk like the Amazon Tap, and some are wake word initiated which means always listening. To add support for muting the microphone with voice would tie Alexa much closer in to the wake word initiated devices, which could be complicated. In addition, supporting muting by voice could lead to frustrating or inevitable accidents where Alexa would think that you said “turn off the device or mute the microphone”, forcing you to get up and un-mute it or to turn it on, as it now cannot respond to you after being muted.

Hence we are left with two options:

Option 1: Turning on the mute button on the device.

Steps: On the Amazon device, press the microphone button.

Doing this enables the button and the ring to turn red, now your microphone is temporarily disabled.

Note 1: The muted Amazon device will keep the red ring and the microphone off until you press the mic button back again.

Option 2: Turning off the microphone.

Now let’s see how to turn off Alexa by turning off its microphone.

Step 1: Click on the microphone button on the bottom of the Alexa device.

When you do Step 1, both that button as well as the indicator ring running around the outside of the device will glow red.

This indicates that Alexa is no longer operational and it would not be able to accept any voice commands until the microphone is re-enabled. This means that Alexa is not listening for the wake word anymore.

Note 1: In the event of the device being unplugged or on a power outage, Alexa would remember the last preferred setting. As soon as the Amazon device goes through their boot sequence, the microphone button or indicator ring will both go back to their glowing red state.

Note 2: If the Amazon Echo or Dot Remote is used, you will not have to turn the device microphone back instead you could use the remote to give Alexa the commands you need, and then Alexa back to be able to hear anything you say.

Note 3: To completely turn off the device, you have to unplug it from an outlet. You need to say “Alexa, stop” and the device will shut down.

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