Fossil and Skagen smartwatches now let you talk to Amazon Alexa

Owners of Fossil and Skagen Gen 6 smartwatches can now get access to Amazon Alexa on their smartwatch after support for the smart assistant was switched on.

Back in January, a Fossil spokesperson told Wareable that it was adding support for Amazon’s voice assistant and in our testing of the Fossil Gen 6 and Skagen Gen 6, an app icon for Alexa was present on both smartwatches.

Wareable verdict: Fossil Gen 6 in-depth review | Skagen Falster Gen 6 review

Now three months later, it seems that Fossil is ready to enable the support and has quietly updated the functionality on its watches, which do run on version 2.0 of Google’s Wear OS operating system.

To use Alexa on your Fossil or Skagen watch, you’ll need to give the app permission to use the onboard microphone included on the watch and use the Alexa companion phone app to pair the smart assistant to your smartwatch.

Once you’ve got things set up, you’ll be able to ask Alexa questions, have it read out notifications, make calls and take control of compatible smart home devices. The responses to those queries won’t be spoken back to you, but instead offers responses on the screen as text. it doesn’t seem as if the Alexa support works with any Fossil-specific commands as far as we know.

These aren’t of course the first smartwatches to offer Alexa on the wrist. Fitbit’s Versa 2, Versa 3 and Sense smartwatches all offer Alexa support and supports both text and audio responses. Amazfit also offers Alexa on a whole range of its smartwatches and even its Band 5 fitness tracker packs on Amazon’s smart assistant.

While this is a nice software update for Fossil and Skagen Gen 6 smartwatches to get access to, the one we are waiting for is that upgrade to Wear OS 3.0. We know that it’s coming at some point in 2022, but the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 still remains the only smartwatch available that runs on the version of Wear built by Google and Samsung.

Via: 9to5 Google