Amazon's Alexa voice assistant is especially useful in the kitchen where taking commands hands-free can be particularly helpful.
Here are six reasons you might want to keep your Alexa speaker in the kitchen.
Out of the box, Alexa can help you maintain lists for shopping and to-do's.
All you have to do is tell Alexa what you want to add and specify which list you want to add it to.
You can say something as simple as, add eggs.
It's added to your shopping list.
Since eggs is a noun, Alexa understand it's an item you would like to add to your shopping list.
You can also say add bread to my shopping list.
To check this list and other lists, open the Alexa app and click lists in the side menu.
You can also sync your lists with any list, cozy lists, or picnic in the Alexa app.
Alexa is also capable of providing unit conversions on the fly.
Just say something like convert two cups to millilitres or how many cups are in a gallon?
One gallon equals 16 cups.
For certain ingredients you can also ask things like how much does a cup of flour weigh?
There is 0.31 pounds of flour in one cup
Forget an egg timer.
Alexa is capable of managing multiple simultaneous timers.
Just say start a timer for five minutes.
After the five minutes passes the speaker will chime until you tell it to stop.
We've created multiple timers, giving them names by saying start a pizza timer for twenty minutes.
To check on a timer just ask how much time is left on my pizza timer, or what are my timers.
Alexa's catalog of third-party skills is home to several helpful recipe skills, such as Allrecipes, Hellman's best recipes, Betty Crocker, Food Network and Goodness from Nestle.
Not only will these skills offer up some great recipes to try, it will tell you the ingredients needed and walk you through the process.
Food Network lets you look up recipes by chef or tv show.
All Recipes sends directions to your phone and best recipes will give you recipes for the ingredients you already have and there are many, many more skills to choose from.
If you're not sure how many calories a food has, just ask Alexa.
It may not always have an answer for you, but it's a great place to start.
For example, try saying, how many calories are there in greek yogurt.
Strained yogurt contains 100 calories.
It can provide info on carbohydrates as well, but only for certain items.
it depends on how wildly available the nutritional information for our product is and it helps if the food is something generic such as steak or Brokley.
5.51 grams per 100 grams.
For more tips and tricks and other how tos, be sure to check out CNET.com/howto.
