-->
If you’re a news junkie, Alexa has got you covered with an easy way to keep up with your interests, whether that’s global news, sports, or a niche topic. Thanks to Amazon’s flash briefings feature, you can customise your daily report so that Alexa plays your favourite bulletins, with the ability to skip between them easily.
In this article, I’ll share all the Alexa news commands for the UK along with how to customise your listening experience. If you’d like to find out more about what Alexa can do, see my full list of Alexa commands.
Yes, Alexa can read the daily news through your Amazon Echo smart speaker or the phone app. You can use the Flash Briefing feature to customise which news bulletins Alexa reads to you and you can skip forward or back at any time.
Flash Briefings are a selection of news briefings that you can curate and ask Alexa to read to you by saying “Alexa, what’s my flash briefing?”, or you can include it as part of an Alexa routine to automatically read it to you each day.
To set up your customised flash briefing:
Your news briefings will play in the order you have select them, you can rearrange the order by tapping ‘Edit’ and dragging them around.
Some examples of flash briefings that I like include BBC, Sky News, Sky Sports, The Guardian, ESPN, Met Office, local police forces across the UK, Buzzfeed, and more.
Here are all the Alexa commands for news in the UK:
These are the news bulletins currently available in the UK, you can also play news from several US news providers such as CNN, Fox, NPR, and more.
You can also hear shorter briefings from other stations by saying, “Alexa, play news from [station]”. These will be read by Alexa rather than a human presented and are the same ones that feature in the flash briefing.
If you’re interested in tuning in to a news radio station rather than a pre-recorded bulletin, Alexa has a few news channels you can listen to:
To listen to one of these, say “Alexa, play [radio station].
If you’re more into John Cena than Jon Snow, then the sports news might be of more interest to you. Here are a few Alexa commands for sports in the UK:
Finally, here are some Alexa commands to help you keep up to date with the latest weather forecast for your area.
Where you don’t specify a time or location, Alexa will default to the current time and your current location.