Amazon has been working diligently to enhance your smart home experience. Earlier this year, the tech giant made some navigational tweaks to the home screen of the Alexa app. Now, they’ve gone a step further. In a recent blog post, Jeff Barberio, Amazon’s product chief for the Alexa mobile app, detailed the latest updates. He emphasized that the objective is to make smart home features more accessible, reducing the clicks needed to reach the most-used devices and features.

The updates include features rolled out in 2023, such as the repositioned Device Favorites and the newly introduced Home Shortcuts bar. Additionally, some recent updates have also been incorporated. The Alexa app now places your most frequently used smart home devices within easy reach on the home page, thanks to the Amazon Device Favorites feature.

The Home Shortcuts bar has been simplified to three main icons – Home, Devices, and More. The last option leads you to functions like Music & More, List & Notes, Reminders, Routines, and other features. The Home page has been further optimized by merging the Activity section and making it more noticeable, thereby making it easier to track your timers, alarms, reminders, and other activities.

For Ring Protect subscribers, a soon-to-be-released update will provide the ability to view up to six snapshots from your Ring camera right from the Alexa app. Barberio didn’t specify a release date for this feature.

The Alexa app’s chat functions have undergone an upgrade, making it easier to engage in a chat, view full-screen visual responses, and access suggested conversation prompts. These updated chat features can be accessed by tapping the blue chat bubble at the bottom right of the screen.

The latest update has also introduced enhanced search controls, facilitating quicker location of your devices. Perhaps the most innovative addition is the Map View feature, which allows you to scan and create a digital layout of your home and pin your connected devices to this plan. However, this feature is currently available as a preview to select customers in the US only and is limited to iOS devices.