How to Enable Quiet Hours on an Echo Device

How To

It was 3:30 AM.  My wife and I were getting the first good night of sleep that our teething daughter would let us have all week.  All was well with the world.  

“YOUR PACKAGE CONTAINING TASTE OF THE WILD DOG FOOD WILL ARRIVE BY EIGHT PM TODAY.”

This announcement had been made throughout my entire house for no discernible reason.  Literally everywhere in America it was far too late (or early) to be pushing shipping notifications!

My wife and I shot out of bed assuming some crazed shopaholic had broken into our room.  The dog, taking a cue from us, started barking at nothing in particular.  This woke the baby in the nursery, who immediately started screaming.  I fell asleep an hour later, dreaming of dog food and Echo Dots being smashed with hammers.

You don’t want this happening to you.

Since that time, Amazon has been nice enough to roll out a Do Not Disturb feature that can be set for each Echo device in your house.  Here’s how to do it:

 

  1. Open the Alexa app on your phone, tablet or computer
  2. Click Settings
  3. You should see a list of devices including any Echo’s, Echo Dots, Echo Shows, Fire TV’s and assorted other Alexa enabled products you may own.
  4. Select the device on which you would like to enable Do Not Disturb from the list by clicking it.
  5. There is a section aptly named Do Not Disturb with a toggle switch and another entry called Scheduled.  Click Scheduled.
  6. Once in the scheduler, click the toggle switch on the top to enable the schedule and then click the Edit link on the bottom.
  7. Here you can select the start and end time for your quiet hours.  Choose your times and then click the Save button.
  8. You’re brought back to the scheduler with your new times showing.  If you’re using the app, you can just hit your phone’s back button to return to the device settings.  If you’re using a browser, you have to hit the back button a number of times, or click Settings to return to the main settings menu (this is silly and needs a simple link to return you to the device settings).
  9. Repeat this procedure for any other device.

That’s all there is to it.  It could be simpler, but I’ll take something kludgy over nothing at all.

For the record, the dog food arrived at 1 PM.