If you’re tired of Alexa chiming in with a verbal confirmation every time you ask her to do something for you, you’re going to want to check out the new “Brief Mode” that Amazon just rolled out. When you activate Brief Mode from the Settings menu of the Alexa app on your smartphone, Alexa will respond to some commands with a short chime noise rather than verbalizing a confirmation. Plus, Alexa will just speak less frequently in general.
For those of you who don’t mind hearing Alexa’s voice every time you talk to your Echo, this feature won’t serve much of a purpose. But for those of us who have grown tired of hearing the same responses in the same tone of voice day in and day out, a less verbose Alexa sounds like an incredibly necessary feature.
The existence of Brief Mode was first discovered by AFTVnews — the same source that uncovered the latest Fire TV devices as well as the Echo Show. According to their report, several Reddit users were granted access to the feature earlier this week in what appeared to be a limited test. Some users claim that the feature was then removed without warning soon after it appeared, but then reappeared later in the day and has been available ever since.
It’s unclear if this is a test limited to a specific group of users or if these are the first steps of a mass rollout, but either way, I personally have yet to see the feature on my Amazon Alexa app. If you’re wondering what to be on the lookout for, TechCrunch says that when the feature became active, Alexa responded to a command by explaining how Brief Mode works and giving the user an option to turn the feature on. We should know more in the coming days.
