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Comment by mgraupner | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of Alexa: Can anyone explain the thought process behind making it possible to change the volume in small increments via buttons, but not via voice command (only in 10% increments)? I only use it as an internet radio player for background music and it's extremely annoying that it can't do that.

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Voice command on volume modulation used to work. Then Video, Music, Shopping and Home Automation built a "revamped" Alexa system and broke it. This is also why people struggle to turn of alarms, why Alexa Pay broke, among many other service-side performance degradations.

Pretty cringe, the number of people who were promoted for this.

10/10 not worth working for Amazon.

Thanks for the feedback.

Can't you just ask it to set the volume to a specific volume as a percentage, like 38%? This works on Google Home. In the Google ecosystem, it also usually works if you ask it to raise the volume by a small increment like 5%. (Other times, this sets the volume to 5%.) I think you also used to be able to ask the device to raise the volume 'a bit' or 'a lot', for 5% or 20% respectively, but that stopped working a long time ago and I haven't tried recently.

If neither of these work, then I am very frustrated on your behalf.

Unfortunately it only knows integers and rounds 15% up to 20% and 12% down to 10%.

If you say, "volume 15 percent" it will set it to 15%.

Not working for me, as I said in another comment, asking it to set it to 15% will set it to 20%.

that sucks that you're the only one in the world that it doesn't work for. sorry to hear that

Instead of being a dick you could have searched for "Alexa set volume to a value less than 1" on Google. Multiple reddit threads with exactly the same problem.

Have you actually checked that "Set volume to 15%" will set it to 15% in the Alexa app?

If it's not doing what you want, you can remap any arbitrary voice command to a precise Volume setting in 1% increments, via a custom Routine.

Which is fine (although these routines are very slow, which makes it awkward to use for volume adjustments), but why make things so complicated when the possibility to adjust the volume in 1% steps via the app and 3% via buttons exist?

Misguided "simplicity" is the bane of modern UX.

You can set the volume to any number from 1-10

Which correlates to 10% and 100%. I want for example 15%, which works with the buttons.

If you say, "volume 15 percent" it will set it to 15%.

I thought each button press on the volume buttons corresponded to + or -10%? I always thought Alexa's volume only had 10 states (11 counting zero) regardless of buttons or voice commands? Maybe it depends on the device, I have the spherical echo.

I checked and it's 3% increments via the buttons. I have 3 different Echos, they all behave the same.

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