Home > News

Alexa Gets New Feature to Alert You of Package Deliveries

By Laura Tucker
Alexa Package Deliveries Featured

The pandemic made a few significant changes to the tech world. One of those was an increase in online shopping. Having packages delivered was many times a better option than braving a brick-and-mortar store in a mask. Amazon is holding on to that reliance and has added a feature to Alexa to send notifications when you receive package deliveries.

Also read: Ring Doorbell Patents Show Future Uses of Biometric Data

Package Delivery Notifications via Alexa

Truthfully, Amazon has been tinkering with its package deliveries even before the global health crisis. The company introduced a program where its customers could allow Amazon drivers to enter their homes when they were gone to deliver packages. But that whole idea just never really seemed too appealing.

Amazon’s new program seems like it can be used by more people. Instead of letting strangers into your home, Alexa will inform you when a package has been delivered.

Alexa Package Deliveries Amazon

Alexa made the Alexa Detection Sensor API available to developers and camera manufacturers. The API “enhances offerings from camera manufacturers who have already developed their own computer vision solutions in three important ways:”

The first enhancement is “Alexa voice notifications on Amazon Echo devices.” These notifications will be triggered by events like a package being dropped off or a person standing on your porch. Users will have an option to hear an Alexa announcement on an Echo speaker; view the video on an Echo Show, Fire tablet, or Fire TV; or simply get a push notification from the Alexa app.

Another enhancement will “provide personalized experiences to end users.” Users can decide which devices will receive customized notifications of package deliveries.

The last enhancement will “enable customers to automate their smart homes.” Routines can be created with smart home devices that will be triggered by an action, such as a package being dropped off. This could lock the front door or turn on the porch light.

Alexa Package Deliveries Ring
Image Source: stevegarfield via Flickr

While you may be thinking this isn’t much different than existing Alexa features, Scott Beck, the CTE of Abode, noted, “We have always had the ability to notify customers with notifications on their phones, but this API allows us to extend this functionality into the house so customers can hear when a package has been delivered or see and talk to the person identified at the front door.”

Truthfully, many times my Ring Camera already announces on my Echo that there is a person at my door when I receive a package delivery. But it says the same thing when someone from my family is coming through the door. I have a delivery app that notifies me a short time later that a package has been delivered. It would be nice to have this process tightened up a bit.

Availability

Once camera manufacturers integrate the API, users can opt in to the Alexa notifications of package deliveries.

So far, Ring, Google, and Abode are the only known camera manufacturers to be partnering with Amazon. All Ring Doorbells can utilize the Person Notification feature as well as cameras certified under “Works with Alexa.” Google Nest Cam, Nest Cam, Nest Cam with floodlight, and Nest Doorbell will soon get this feature. It will be available, too, for the Abode IOTA and outdoor cameras.

Alexa Package Deliveries Google Nest

So far, only Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2 and Ring Video Doorbell (2020 release) can access the Package Deliveries notifications, and it will release for the Abode IOTA and outdoor cameras.

Once the manufacturer has integrated the API into your camera, you can opt in to the Alexa person and package deliveries notifications on the camera settings page of the Alexa app.

Read on to learn about one of Alexa’s most recent enhancements: Conversation Mode.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.
In October 2002, a Russian scientist named Dimitri Malashenkov stood up at a space conference in Houston and quietly explained that the dog Laika, whom the Soviet Union had publicly mourned as a heroic week-long orbiter in 1957, had actually died of heat and panic within about five hours of launch.