From basic uses to hidden Easter eggs, here's how to get the most out of your Echo

Whether you just got your first Echo device or you've had one for a while now, some tricks are hidden up your Alexa device's sleeves that can be real game-changers. Between Easter eggs, third-party Alexa skills, and lesser-known and sometimes device-specific features, there are plenty of things you might not have known your Echo could do. We've collected some of the most useful ones here and some that are just fun.

There are plenty of conventional things to ask your Echo for. You can ask it about simple things like the time or the weather. You can also ask it to be a timer or to add items to your shopping list. You can ask for restaurant recommendations, sports scores, or the news. And you can ask about upcoming calendar reminders, set new ones, or set an alarm for the morning. If you know someone else with an Echo, you can do an Alexa voice call with them. You can even do a video call if you have an Echo Show.

To take full advantage of the speaker part of your smart speaker, you'll want to connect to your preferred music service. All the big players, apart from YouTube Music, are there. You can connect your Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, or a few others, not just Amazon Music, and you'll have access to all your carefully curated playlists.

Your Echo isn't limited to playing music and podcasts. If you want to get through that growing collection of books, your Echo can play back your audiobooks from Audible and read your Kindle titles to you.

Now that you're using your Echo to binge your book backlog, you might be tempted to extend your listening time later and later. If you like to read in bed, and listening to audiobooks is no exception, it's frustrating to fall asleep in the middle of a book only to wake up hours later with it still going or already having finished in the middle of the night.

If you want to prevent that, tell Alexa to set a sleep timer for however long you plan on being awake. If you fall asleep before then, at least you'll have a lot less backtracking to do to find your place again. Alternatively, you can use sleep timers as a way to remind you to go to bed.

If you're looking for other ways to ease yourself to sleep, scheduling your lighting with smart bulbs can ease you awake in the morning and gently remind you to go to bed, and that's another thing that an Echo is great for.

Plenty of Echo devices even function as a Zigbee hub, so you can buy any Zigbee compatible smart bulbs, or other smart devices for that matter, and seamlessly add them to your Alexa app with no need for a standalone hub.

Right now, the only Echo devices that work as a Zigbee hub are the 4th Gen Echo, Echo Plus, Gen 2 and newer Echo Show 10 smart displays, and the Echo Studio. If you don't have any of these, that's not a big deal. There's no shortage of "Works with Alexa" devices that are easy to set up on your phone and control with any Echo.

Controlling lights and turning smart plugs on and off with your voice is an obvious smart home integration, but Alexa can do much more through your Echo. While it's hard to make a case for the Alexa-enabled sous vide cooker, smart thermostats make it easy to check or change the temperature in your house without standing up. If you have an Echo Show, there's no shortage of security cameras that you can check on at a whim.

If you decide to expand your Echo collection so you can control your smart home from everywhere, another benefit is being able to play music in multiple rooms. You can group any number of Echo devices together and tell Alexa to play music on it. Being able to decide the grouping is handy if you want to play music for a party in your dining room, kitchen, and living room, but you don't need to add any bedroom Echos into the mix.

If you aren't much of a host, you can still take advantage of this with Audible by pausing your book in one room and resuming it in another.

If you don't like saying "Alexa" to get your Echo's attention, you can change your wake word. Instead of the default "Alexa," you can also go with "Amazon," "Echo," "Computer" if you've always wanted to feel like you were in Starfleet, and "Ziggy" if you were more of a Quantum Leap fan. You can also enable "Santa" as a wake word in the app, but Santa's time is valuable, so he's only around for holiday-related requests.

If you thought the Easter eggs ended with some of those wake word options, you're sorely mistaken. There are plenty of inside jokes and references for Trekkies, movie buffs, gamers, music nerds, lovers of the written word, dad joke fans, and even some celebrity cameos thrown in for good measure.

If you've already changed your Echo's wake word to "computer," be sure to ask for "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." to hear what it has to say. There's no shortage of Easter eggs just like that if you want a quick chuckle or want to be reminded who actually shot first.

If you want to set up your own inside joke like that, you can create a custom Q&A for Alexa. You can set this up in a couple of minutes with the custom Q&A button on the Alexa Skill Blueprints site. All you do is enter your custom question, along with any other variations of it you want Alexa to recognize, and what you want Alexa's response to be, and you're done!

If you don't want to be the one to tell your child that they shouldn't have ice cream for dinner, let Alexa break it to them. You can also use other Alexa blueprints to let visitors know important info, such as how to turn on the TV.

If you want custom skills like that, but don't want to make them yourself, one of the best parts of the Alexa ecosystem is the availability of third-party skills. Think of skills like apps for your Echo, and similar to searching for new apps in an app store, Alexa has a skill-finder function and a new curated list of skills every day. There are skills to find your phone, order a pizza, call an Uber, and virtually anything else you can think up. There's even an Alexa skill to play Skyrim (albeit a text-based version), and Capital One has an Alexa skill to authorize your monthly bill payment, but maybe you should just enable auto-pay. Whether you already own an Echo or you were about to buy the best Echo for you, we hope you try out some of these tips.

Connor is 6'5", quite literally making him a massive nerd. His first Android was a Samsung Intercept he bought in 2010, and he's been a rabid Android fan ever since. When he's away from his keyboard, he's usually taking photos or working out. Reach me at c.nolan at androidpolice dot com