Alexa notifications have been around for a couple of years now and can be extremely useful in some cases. If you are not familiar with Alexa notifications, this is a push notification sent to your Echo devices that causes a yellow ring to flash on the device. You are then supposed to ask “Alexa, what’s my notification?”, but more often than not will wind up asking “Alexa, why are you yellow?” after completely forgetting what you’re supposed to say to get the notification.
Often times, this will be a notification telling you the status of your order. Occasionally this will be about a sale on an item you often purchase. But thanks to a recent update, you may be getting incredibly annoying notifications about deals you might be interested in, requests to rate products you purchased, or Q&A on items where you may have participated by asking or answering a question in the (far distant) past.
This isn’t something that just happens to the casual user. Just a few days ago I heard my wife grumbling “Why the hell is it flashing yellow again?!” I asked for my notifications, and was told someone had asked a question about an answer I’d given weeks ago. I chalked it up as weird and moved on with my day. Then yesterday, I got a notification about a sale on something I might want to purchase. That’s when I realized that something was amiss.
I checked my notification settings, and sure enough, there were new categories I’d never seen before with the notifications turned on. Here are all of the Alexa notification categories (as of September 2020):
- Announcements
- Reminders
- Amazon Shopping
- Out for delivery
- Delivered
- Let Alexa say or show titles for items you’ve ordered
- For items in your delivery updates
- Including items in your shopping cart marked as gifts or those that might be gifts during major holidays
- Recommendations & deals
- Receive notifications from Customer Q&A and reviews ratings
- Answers to your product questions
- Requests to rate products you’ve purchased
- Order updates
- Answer updates
- Allow Alexa to send notifications about new answers to your questions
- Things to try
- Receive notifications with new things to try
- Phone updates
- Alexa device notifications
- Receive notifications with new things to try
- Guest connect
- Alexa will send a notification when a guest connects to your devices
- News
- Receive news alerts on your devices
- Fox News
- NPR
- Receive news alerts on your devices
That’s a lot of notification preferences to keep track of! Personally, I only keep Announcements, Reminders, Things to try – phone updates, and Guest connect activated. Everything else is just noise.
Now here’s where you go to disable them:
- Open the Alexa app and tap the More menu
- Tap Settings
- Tap Notifications
- Use the list above to navigate to each notification you’d like to enable/disable or to check the current status of that notification
- Your new preference will automatically be saved for all devices