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Amazon's Echo Buttons now perform whole routines with a tap

They can serve as handy physical shortcuts for Alexa commands.

Amazon's Echo Buttons are now useful for considerably more than playing party games. The company has enabled support for performing Alexa routines by tapping a button. You can turn on the lights without talking to your speaker, or let guests cue music without having to remember the specific commands. In that sense, it's a more flexible alternative to the Hue Tap -- so long as you live in Amazon's ecosystem, of course.

You can enable the feature by creating routines in the latest Alexa app and then choosing an Echo Button as the trigger. Will this make you race to spend $20 on a pair of button? Probably not. However, it might give you a reason to keep them in use instead of relegating them to a drawer most of the time.