Happen to use the media streaming app Plex and also have an Amazon Echo device? We have some good news: the two now play nice together.
Plex on Thursday announced support for Amazon's Alexa voice assistant, which powers the Echo and other devices. The integration lets you control your movie, music, and TV show collections with your voice — and put away all the remotes cluttering up your living room table.
Once you get it set up, you can say things like "Alexa, ask Plex what's new?" for a list of titles recently added to your Plex library. When you're ready to watch or listen to something, just say "Alexa, ask Plex to play" followed by whatever it is you're in the mood for. As you can see in the video below, Alexa and Plex can understand really specific requests, such as "play season 4, episode 9 of The Goldbergs."
Plex has also integrated suggestions within its Alexa skill. You can, for instance, say "Alexa, ask Plex to suggest some music to listen to" or "Alexa, ask Plex to get this party started."
To set it up, tell Alexa to enable the Plex skill. From there, just link your account and ask Alexa to "open Plex" to start using the skill.
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Meanwhile, Plex is having a pretty busy week. The company on Tuesday announced the acquisition of news streaming service Watchup.
For the uninitiated, Plex organizes all your media content — movies, TV shows, music, and photo collections — and streams it to your devices. Watchup aggregates more than 150 news sources like CBS, CNN, and Vox, letting users build their own newscasts with local, national, and international content based on their interests.
Plex said the acquisition will help it build out a "robust content ecosystem," so users will be able to access news content from one place, on any device, whenever they want.