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This guide has been prepared to show you the required steps involved in creating a regular water reminder that you can use with your smart speaker. The guide covers all the Amazon Alexa Echo Speaker and Show devices, including those with a screen and those with just a speaker.

The amount that you need to drink will vary from person to person and also depends on the weather/temperature, the amount of exercise that you do and if you are unwell (i.e. have sickness and diarrhoea.  The rough guidelines are to drink regularly throughout the day and aim to drink 6-8 mugs.

There are some skills on Alexa that provide water reminders. However, you need to remember to activate them every day and they are quite rigid in the timing of the reminders.  For these reasons I would recommend setting up the prompts to remember to drink in the Alexa app Reminder function, which is great for medication reminders as well.

Should you have any difficulties please don’t hesitate to get in touch at info@tltechsmart.com.

We have also created a series of videos to help you, which you can find on our YouTube Channel. The video that accompanies this guide is here:

Creating a Reminder with The Alexa App #

You can set repeating reminders with Alexa, the minimum frequency is daily.  So what you’ll need to do is input the reminder multiple times, i.e. at 9am repeating every day, at 10.30am repeating every day, at 12noon repeating every day, etc through to the last reminder of the day at 6pm.  In your reminders list you will then have multiple entries, but it works.  When setting the reminders via the app you can select what device that you would like to announce from, this can be all of your devices, one of your speaker devices or the app on your phone.

Here are the steps to follow to set up the reminders using the Alexa app on a mobile or tablet device:

• Open the Alexa app.
• Tap on three lines in the bottom right corner of the screen.
• Tap on Reminders & Alarms.
• Tap on Reminders.
• Tap on Add Reminder.
• Enter the name of your Reminder, i.e. Drink Water.
• Tap on Announces from.  Here you will see a list of all your speaker devices, you can choose one of these, or your mobile phone, or you can choose All Devices.
• Enter the date that you would like the reminder to begin from.
• Tap on Repeat.
• Tap on Multiple times a day.
• Tap on Repeat and select how many times you would like the reminder to repeat each day. For the water reminders you’ll probably want to set up 8 or 9 times.
• You will then see a number of times appear matching the number of repeats you selected, the default is for 2 hour gaps between reminders.  You will see the time of the first reminder will be the nearest half an hour to the current time.  So to make it easier and not need to do as much editing of the times you could set this reminder sequence up in the morning when you would like to have your first drink.
• If you want to change the times allocated, tap on Change next to each time to set the time for each reminder.
• Tap Done when you have set your times.

The great thing about doing it this way is it is fully customisable and once it is programmed in then you don’t have to worry about doing it again.

These reminders are great for lots of things, including remembering when to take medication.

For further tips on using Amazon Alexa to support your wellbeing we’ve written a blog post and short video guide.

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