I, For One, Welcome Our Robot Overlords

Nadira: Alexa, open MyCast and play More Than Steps.

Alexa: Searching for latest episode of More Than Steps podcast Belly Dance Geek. Here it is from MyCast.

Nadira: You’re listening to More Than Steps, the podcast where we geek out on how belly dance works one coffee run at a time. Alexa, stop. Alexa, thank you.

Alexa: You bet.

Nadira: If you have an Amazon Echo or another Alexa enabled device, it is easier than ever to listen to the show. Now I love listening to podcasts when I’m puttering around the house. Whether I’m cooking, cleaning up, folding laundry, feeding the cats, sitting back and knitting, I love to have a podcast going.

Usually, I listen with headphones on my iPhone because I’ve always found it a little bit tricky to access the audio that I want through my Amazon Echo. Luckily, Blubrry, the hosting company that hosts this show, has a brand new skill available for Alexa called MyCast, which can let you play the podcasts directly just with a voice command.

If you’d like to enable that, you’ll need to take one step first, and that’s to install the My Cast skill. To do that, you can either go to the Alexa app and then go to the skills menu, or in a web browser you can go to Amazon.com/skills. Once you’re there, search for MyCast, and then select the “Enable Skill” option.

Once you have the MyCast skill installed all you have to do is say, “Alexa, open MyCast and play More Than Steps”. Once your podcast is playing, you can use additional commands like “Alexa, pause”, “Alexa, resume” or “Alexa, stop”. This is such an easy way to listen especially when you’re in a hands-free situation like doing messy chores. I hope you enjoy it.

And don’t forget to say, “Alexa, thank you.” When the robots inevitably rise up to overthrow us all, you really want to be on her good side.