Weird Amazon Echo behavior

Today at 11:00 a.m. CDT, all three of my Amazon Echoes began beeping at the same time. The pattern was boop-boop-boop (rest) boop-boop-boop (rest), and so on for about 5 minutes until I finally said “Alexa stop.” While it was booping, the blue light was circling the top of the Echo.

I don’t have any alarms set. While the booping was going on I looked at the Amazon app on my phone to see if there was any message being conveyed to me, but there did not seem to be any activity.

My neighbor has a NOAA radio in her apartment and at 11:00 a.m. everyday it does a check of an alarm system. But I don’t have that. I went over and asked her about this but she’s not an Alexa person so she didn’t have any idea.

Didn’t have time to do an exhaustive Google search on this, so I thought I’d come here first.

Ideas?

A quick googling doesn’t show specifics, but I have had similar experiences when one or more of my echoes started or got stuck in an update loop. Since the 4 I use are all different generations though, I’ve never to the best of my knowledge have it sync up that way.

I have had one get stuck in such a loop, and normally a power cycle fixes it, but have had to do a full reset on it once. And it’s the oldest of the 4 models.

I have read (sorry, no cite) that Alexa may beep when it has a bad wi-fi connection. Something to consider.

ETA: Also check Bluetooth if you are using that to connect to Alexa.

That’s a good point, although we know the home has great WiFi, if there was an interruption or the T-mobile gateway was temporarily cycling / had an interruption (possibly more likely as it’s cellular) it could produce something similar - my echoes go Red when they don’t have an active internet connection.

If you still have the Alexa app set up on your phone @ThelmaLou did it show any messages / alerts / errors from around that time?

Not that I see. I’m not at home at the moment. When I get home should I unplug/replug each one?

My Echo has never done this and I hope it never does. My dog is already very scared of the thing, an also afraid of beeping. So if it started beeping, or even just booping, that might be the end of Grady.

How about reminders?

My Gen1 Echo has a recurrent, if not frequent, bug. It will convert my reminders (eg, “David. Take out the garbage”) to alarms (ie, an alarm sound with no spoken words).

It seems to be a known bug. If I add a new reminder, it works as it should. If I delete all my old/existing reminders and re-enter them. it’ll work correctly.

I do a full unplug-wait a minute-plug in reboot, followed by re-entering the reminders, and it seems to resolve it.

I have pasted my recurrent reminders into a text file so that I can copy-and-paste them into the Alexa app when needed.

I’m not assuming this is your issue. Just leaving my experience here for the knowledge base.

Alternate answer: TL? I was just thinking of you. This was my way of saying “Hey!”

I wouldn’t bother UNLESS you’re getting errors, they become unresponsive (doesn’t respond to your voice input, or the blue cycling continues endlessly) or the problem reoccurs in the soon-ish future.

Like a lot of things, blips happen - if it goes away, probably a passing thing like a brief interruption in connection or update. If it happens again, or happens in any sort of consistent pattern, then it’s more worrisome.

Flip side though, power-cycling such devices rarely hurts them either. But if something is wrong, and it falls off the network and/or needs to be fully reset afterwards, it’s more of a pain than it’s worth if it’s otherwise working normally.

Not much help I know.

Good suggestions. I don’t have any reminders. I don’t even have Alexa synced with my calendar.



It’s helpful to know it’s probably no big deal.

My Amazon Echo has decided that despite the settings it had, I now want to see ads.

My Amazon Echo has made some sort of announcement from the bedroom every evening around 6:30 for the past week or so (I don’t know what it says, it’s quiet and muffled and I’m too lazy to jump up and run to the bedroom to listen to it).

Maybe I’ll make the effort tonight just to see what she wants.

mmm

If I’m not wearing my hearing aids or sitting right next to the speaker, I can’t understand her muffly voice either. I have a feeling she’s making helpful suggestions that would improve my life a thousand-fold, but that I have no interest in.

She’s saying “ThelmaLou, put in your hearing aids.”

That reminds me of an Eddie Murphy comedy bit where he was making fun of cars that talked to you (a brief fad in the 80s).

Murphy telling the story:

Car: Your lights are on.
Car: I said your lights are on!
Car: What, are you deaf AND blind? I said YOUR LIGHTS ARE ON!

Probably. :rofl: :rofl: