Using Echo to communicate between two places and not people

[rogersmj]

Hi all,

heres a challenge, it could be easy, but i'm struggling...

I am renovating a house, half my family is in the house and half in a static caravan in the front garden. Both have access to Wi-Fi and both have an Echo (one an echo and one an echo dot).

I want to use the communications side to be able to call the caravan from the house, or vice versa, however of course the 'system' is set up to call contacts, rather than places.

Would anyone please be able to give me step by step instructions how to set this up? I've managed to get the comms working briefly by adding new contacts in my address book on my iPhone (and my son done the same on his), but one of the issues seems to be that I bought the echo using my Amazon Prime account, and my son bought the Dot using his Amazon account. Seems that theres a problem there???

Thanks in advance

Matt

[malliekm]

 Each device has to have a phone number associated with it.  Calling Echo to Echo is possible so I'm not seeing the problem.  Have you figured this out yet?  I send my parents messages to their Echo device and vice versa.  Different accounts and difference households.  We don't use the calling feature but could.  Quite possible I'm not understanding the problem.

[TonyB]

A couple of things.

First, you should link your account and your son's account in the same household - you can do that under Settings in the Alexa app (I had a similar issue as my wife's account has Prime but I was doing things in my own, non-prime account). You may also want to train Alexa to differentiate between your voice and your son's voice, also under settings.

Next, you can try the drop in feature which is similar to calling but doesn't use an actual phone number. If you turn on drop in on each of the devices you should be able to say "Alexa, drop in on [name of device in caravan]" and it will sound 3 tones on that device and now you're able to talk back and forth - they should also be able to drop in on you. I've been using this feature as an itercom in my house and it is pretty cool - you can actually even drop in to any enabled device right from the app on your phone so you don't have to be right next to an echo at all.

Good luck!

[rogersmj]

Hi,

thanks for the info, however i'm not sure about relating the two echos to one household? I can see that the settings say that you can use drop in 'only for household', so thats fine, but how do I relate the two echos to the same household? I cannot actually see an option in the settings that manages households??

When I open the settings, I can see all my Amazon devices, fire sticks and echos, if I choose one of the echos I get settings for that device, but nothing talks about relating households?

Also you mentioned there was the advice about relating a phone number to a device, how is this done?

i'm sure i'm very close, but I just need to understand the fine points and I should be there

Thanks in advance