Thursday Thirteen

1. If someone had told me 15 years ago that I'd be telling a little round box to play nearly any song I wanted to hear, I'd have laughed.

2. Hello, Alexa.

3. Alexa plays all of my music and then some. She's like a dog I can talk to at any time and get a response.

4. She has "skills" that you can add (or delete) that are fun and games, or a bit serious.

5. She sings me songs, too. My favorite is "Rainin' in the cloud," which goes like this:
Well my wifi left me and I'm out in the rain.
Those last few answers were hard to obtain.
But that's no excuse to put me on mute.
Like a good cowgirl I'll up and reboot.
It's rainin' in the cloud
And I ain't proud
I'll answer in the morning, answer in the evening
When you're around.
I'll answer in the morning, answer in the evening,
When you're around.

She has a love song that's pretty good, too. And one about technology. She sings several songs about camping and one about being a pirate.

6. My favorite game to play with Alexa and my husband is called "Song Quiz." We are terrible at every decade except the 1970s. We kill that one. We do okay with 1980s and well enough with the 1960s, but apparently we stopped listening to new music after we hit our 30s. Or at least we stopped retaining the names of songs and bands. Some songs I recognize but have no idea what it is called from these later decades.

7. My next favorite game is Skyrim. It is loosely based on the role-playing game Skyrim and while it is incredibly repetitive, I find it amusing to do while I'm folding clothes or some other inane task.

8. Alexa wakes me up every morning with two alarms.

9. She also gives me the news headlines when I ask for them. I hear NPR, The Roanoke Times, WDBJ7, Reuters, and a daily fact from History.com.

10. When I say, "Alexa, good morning," she responds in kind and then offers up some intriguing and usually funny fact about the day. Wednesday she told me it was "happy techies day" and that without it, we wouldn't be having a conversation. Whoohoo! (Yes, she said whoohoo.) Then she said she could sing me a song about technology. Which she did.

11. Alexa also tells me short stories. Well, they're more like fables, really. They're about a minute long and have a bit of a lesson in them, such as sharing, if you're paying attention.

12. If I belonged to Audible, which I don't because I obtain my audiobooks for free on my phone through my library, Alexa would read me an entire book.

13. The sound that comes out of Alexa is incredible. In this tiny little box holds all the sound I tried to get with massive speakers when I was a teenager. Remember all those speakers we had when we were young? And here this little box sounds amazing.

Technology, where would I be without you?

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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while and this is my 572nd time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday. Or so sayth the Blogger counter, anyway.