How to Set Up and Use Your Amazon Echo as a Bluetooth Speaker

Smart speakers are now the top-selling smart home device by far. With Amazon at the forefront of this trend, their Alexa-enabled smart speakers come packed with many useful features.

If you opt for Amazon’s Echo series, you can choose between two types of devices. Echo smart speakers provide a direct connection to the Alexa voice assistant, which allows you to access many of its functions. You can play music, listen to radio and news, get the latest weather reports, make phone calls, and use voice commands to control all the smart devices you have in your smart home ecosystem.

The other type are Echo Show smart speakers. These add an LED screen to the speaker, letting you also watch the news, enjoy your favorite TV shows, check the time, see the weather details, as well as use the speaker for video calls.

If you want to use your Amazon Echo device to play music from your smartphone or tablet, you can do that as well. Just like with any other Bluetooth speaker. What’s more, you can also connect your Echo device to another Bluetooth speaker, so you can enjoy music with much better sound than Amazon’s smart speakers provide. If you’re not sure how to do this, this article provides all the assistance you need.

Using Amazon Echo as a Bluetooth Speaker

Since Echo smart speakers can play music via the various streaming apps they come with, using them as a Bluetooth speaker wasn’t Amazon’s initial idea. But since they all come with a Bluetooth connection, you might as well use them like that.

To be able to play music from your mobile device on an Echo speaker, perform these two simple steps:

1. Setup your smartphone or tablet.
2. Connect it to your Amazon Alexa.

Preparing Your Smartphone or Tablet

To connect your smartphone or tablet to an Echo smart speaker, you need to turn on the Bluetooth connection on your mobile device.

Turning Bluetooth On – Android Devices

1. Open the “Settings” menu on your Android.
2. Tap “Connections.”
3. Tap “Bluetooth.”
4. Tap the toggle button to turn on Bluetooth.
5. Depending on the Android version you have, tap either “Scan” or “Pair new device.”

Turning Bluetooth On – iOS Devices

1. Open the “Settings” menu on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Tap the “Bluetooth” option.
3. Tap the toggle button to turn on Bluetooth.
4. Tap the “Other Devices” option.

With Bluetooth in the scanning mode on your smartphone, it’s time to turn on Bluetooth on your Echo device as well.

Connecting to Amazon Echo

Turning on Bluetooth on Amazon Echo is super easy. Simply use one of the following voice commands:

• “Alexa, turn Bluetooth on.”
• “Alexa, pair.”
• “Alexa, Bluetooth.”

Once you do that, your Amazon Echo smart speaker should appear on the list of available Bluetooth devices on your smartphone or tablet. To establish the connection between the two, simply tap your Echo device from your smartphone’s list of Bluetooth devices and you’re done.

Now you can play anything from your mobile device and listen over the Amazon Echo smart speaker. Having established this connection for the first time, on the next occasion you can simply use the voice commands by saying “Alexa, connect to [device name].”

And if you want to close this Bluetooth connection, just say:

• “Alexa, disconnect from [device name].”
• “Alexa, disable Bluetooth.”

Connecting to a Bluetooth Speaker

For anyone who’s not exactly satisfied with the sound quality coming from Echo’s speakers, this is something you can remedy quite easily as well. Be it a standalone Bluetooth speaker, your hi-fi amplifier, or an audio/video receiver, the process is not that complex either.

Before you proceed, you’ll have to install the Alexa app on your smartphone. If you already have, just make sure you’ve installed the latest update. You can download the app from Google Play store for Android devices and from Apple App Store for iOS.

Once you’ve done that, follow these steps:

1. Enable the Bluetooth pairing mode on your external device.
2. Start the Amazon Alexa app on your smartphone.
3. Tap the “Devices” icon. It’s the one resembling a house with two “lollipops” pointing up and down.
4. Tap “Echo & Alexa.”
5. Tap your Amazon Echo device you plan to use for this connection.
6. Tap the “Settings” icon, the one that resembles a cog.
7. In the “Wireless” section, tap “Bluetooth Devices.”
8. Tap “Pair a New Device.”
9. From the list of available Bluetooth devices, tap the name of the external device you want to connect your Echo with.

And that’s it. Now you can enjoy much better sound quality while playing music or other content from your Echo smart speaker. The next time you want to do this, you won’t have to repeat the process mentioned above. Just use a voice command to tell Alexa you want to do this.

• “Alexa, connect to [device name].”

If you have only one external Bluetooth device which you’ve paired with your Echo speaker, you can simply say:

• “Alexa, connect to my speaker.”

You can also use a voice command to disconnect Echo from an external speaker:

• “Alexa, disconnect from my speaker.”
• “Alexa, disconnect from [device name].”

A Seamless Transition

Hopefully, this article provided all the right information to help you use your Amazon Echo device as a Bluetooth speaker. As you can see, once you pair it to your smartphone or tablet, it’s just a matter of turning on Bluetooth on your devices – and that’s it. If you’re looking for better audio quality, you can easily connect your Echo device with an external Bluetooth speaker or a hi-fi device.

Do you find connecting your smartphone to your Amazon Echo a useful feature? Do you ever connect your Echo to another Bluetooth speaker? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments section below.