Amazon's lineup of smart home devices has grown over the years. If you recently switched to the Amazon Alexa ecosystem, you might have some questions. Questions like, "What can an Echo Dot do?" or "Is the flagship Echo Studio worth it?" might be at the forefront of your mind. But most of all, you want to know the tricks of the trade.

The basic skills are some of the most helpful. Some of these tips give you a leg-up in customizing your Echo's skills and setting up helpful bedtime routines that streamline your smart home experience.

Getting started: Basic Echo skills and features you'll want to try

The Echo is great for the common smart assistant requests you might use every day. You can ask about simple things like the time or the weather. You can set a timer or add items to your shopping list. You can ask for restaurant recommendations, sports scores, or the news. It manages that just fine. You can ask about upcoming calendar reminders, set new ones, or set an alarm for the morning. Echo owners can also make voice calls to each other, and Echo Show owners can make video calls.

Unless you're a Prime Music subscriber, you'll connect to your preferred music service to take advantage of the speaker part of your smart speaker. Ignoring YouTube Music, all the big players are available. You can connect to Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, and a few others, not only Amazon Music, and access your curated playlists.

Your Echo isn't limited to streaming music and podcasts. Kindle subscribers can listen to their audiobooks on their smart spaker, and many Kindle ebook titles can be read aloud as well.

Advanced Amazon Alexa tips to keep your life organized

If you use your Echo to binge your book backlog, you may be tempted to push your listening time back later and later. If you like to read in bed, and listening to audiobooks is no exception, it's frustrating to fall asleep in the middle of a book and wake up hours later with it still going or having finished in the middle of the night.

To prevent that, tell Alexa to set a sleep timer for how long you plan to be awake. If you fall asleep before then, you'll have less backtracking to do to find your place. Alternatively, sleep timers can remind you to go to bed.

Set up a smart home with your Amazon Echo

If you're looking for other ways to ease yourself to sleep, scheduling your lighting with smart bulbs can ease you awake in the morning and gently remind you to go to bed.

Some Echo devices function as Zigbee hubs. You can buy Zigbee-compliant smart bulbs or another smart device and seamlessly add them to your Alexa app without needing a standalone hub.

The only Echo devices that work overtime as a Zigbee hub are the 4th Gen Echo, Echo Plus, Gen 2 and newer Echo Show 10 smart displays, and the Echo Studio. If you don't have any of these, Works with Alexa devices are easy to set up on your phone and control with any Echo, with no hub required.

If you're new to smart home hardware, the current state of smart home compatibility can be overwhelming. Our best advice is to check the specs and reviews and make sure you can return your order if it doesn't work with your other smart home hardware. The Matter smart home standard should alleviate many of these problems.

One smart home integration is controlling lights and turning smart plugs on and off with your voice, but Alexa can do more through your Echo. While it's hard to make a case for the Alexa-compatible sous vide cooker, smart thermostats make it easy to check or change the temperature in your house without standing up. If you have an Echo Show, there's no shortage of security cameras.

When you expand your Echo collection to control your smart home from every room in your house, you'll benefit from multiroom listening. You can group any number of Echo devices and tell Alexa to play music on them. Deciding on the grouping is handy if you want to play music for a party in your dining room, kitchen, and living room, but you don't want bedroom Echos in the mix.

Learn how to adjust your Echo's sound settings to get the most out of its playback.

If hosting isn't your bag, take advantage of this with Audible by pausing your book in one room and resuming it in another.

Create custom Alexa wake words and find Echo Easter eggs

You can change the wake word if you're tired of saying "Alexa" to get your Echo's attention. Instead of the default "Alexa," say "Amazon," "Echo," "Computer" if you want to feel like you are in Starfleet, or "Ziggy" if you're a Quantum Leap fan. You can also use "Santa" as a wake word in the app, but Santa's time is valuable, so he's only around for holiday-related requests.

The Easter eggs don't end with those wake word options. There are plenty of inside jokes and references for Trekkies, movie buffs, gamers, music nerds, lovers of the written word, dad joke fans, and some celebrity cameos thrown in for good measure.

If you change your Echo's wake word to "computer," ask for "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." to hear what it says. There isn't a shortage of Easter eggs if you want a quick chuckle or want to be reminded who actually shot first. There are a few Game of Thrones Easter eggs if House of the Dragon piqued your interest in House Targaryen.

To set up your own inside joke, create a custom Q&A for Alexa. You can do this in a few minutes with the custom Q&A button on the Alexa Skill Blueprints site. All you do is enter your custom question, along with variations of it you want Alexa to recognize and what you want Alexa's response to be, and you're done!

If you don't have the heart, let Alexa break it to your kiddos that they can't have ice cream for dinner. You can also use other Alexa blueprints to let visitors know important info, such as how to turn on the TV. That's good if someone is house-sitting for you or you have an Airbnb. There are plenty of skills to help you.

Amazon Alexa's skills are top-notch

Streamlining Amazon Alexa's skills on your Echo can boost your smart home experience. From custom skills to third-party options made by developers, you can ask Alexa to stream your favorite music, play brown noise if you have trouble sleeping, and other skills like playing a round of "20 Questions" or setting a sleep timer.

When in doubt, ask your Echo if it can do a task. Odds are, Alexa can find a skill for that. A helpful tip is to start with Alexa's skills of the day. Ask Alexa what they are to hear a list.

If you don't have an Echo, take some time to figure out which Echo is right for you. From a studio-worthy speaker like Echo Studio to Echo Show smart displays, Amazon has something for everyone.