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The edges of it. Explanation in writing is all that gets made here, and the list of what does not exist is worth stating outright. No number has ever been published. Nobody sits and advises. Nothing gets reached into from elsewhere, no fault is traced, no login is put back, and no piece of hardware is repaired. Across the whole site there is not one field asking for a password, a card, or any detail belonging to you, and nowhere to log in even if there were.
Whoever holds the Alexa name holds it still, as with Echo and Echo Dot. They turn up on these pages because there is no other way to indicate which hardware is meant. Should a piece of your own equipment have actually failed, that is a matter for its maker or for the shop that sold it.
Ambient devices · plain English
The category most often bought on impulse and abandoned soonest. Which of these genuinely change a room, and which are a fortnight of novelty.
Light climbing steadily across the half-hour ahead of an alarm plays to the very signal the body reads to decide the night has ended. Most people who try one keep it.
That is not true of most things in this category, and it is worth knowing which is which before spending.
Start here
Four quite different devices, with quite different odds of still being used at Easter. Tap one.
Tap what you are considering
Your answer appears just underneath
A description of how each is built to work. Nothing here is medical advice of any kind.
What actually works
An honest sort through, including the ones not worth the money.
Tap a claim to weigh up
Your answer appears just underneath
General information. Persistent sleep difficulty is a matter for a doctor rather than a device.
In more detail
What changes a space, and what merely adds an object to it.
Of everything in this category, changing the light is what changes a room. Colour temperature and brightness together decide whether a space feels like morning, like an office, or like an evening — and both can be scheduled to shift without anybody touching anything.
Anybody with one purchase to make should make it a lighting one. Our lighting explainer covers the three tiers and which suits which room.
A projector throwing patterns across a ceiling is genuinely striking the first several times. Whether it survives beyond that depends entirely on the room.
In a child's bedroom, used at bedtime, they last years. In a sitting room used by adults every evening they tend to be switched on for visitors and forgotten between times. Neither is wrong; it is worth being honest about which room this is.
A diffuser puts something into the air of a room people sit in for hours. Anybody in the household with asthma or a respiratory condition should be part of that decision rather than presented with it.
The connected part of these is also the least useful in the category — scheduling scent is a small convenience, and the device is doing the same thing a plug-in from a supermarket does.
Lighting first, by a wide margin. Sound second, because masking a road or a neighbour is a real problem being genuinely solved. Projectors third and only in the right room. Scent last, and only where nobody in the house has a reason to object.
Questions
Each answer opens where you tap it.
The principle behind it is not in doubt: the body reads light to work out the hour, and rising into brightness rather than being jolted awake by noise in a dark room is a difference people notice. Most who try it carry on.
None of which makes it a remedy. Mornings that are hard in a way going past mere dislike belong in front of a doctor, not solved by a bedside lamp.
Genuinely debated. The idea that cooler light in the evening delays sleep has support, but how much difference a domestic bulb makes against a bright screen held at arm's length is much less settled.
Whether a warm, dim room is pleasant in the evening is not debated at all, and that alone is a decent reason to set it up.
For masking, yes, and simply. Steady broadband sound raises the floor so that a passing car or a neighbour's television no longer stands out sharply enough to wake somebody.
It needs no connection to do that, which makes the smart versions of these the least necessary in the category.
That is a question for whoever makes the product and, where anybody in the house has a respiratory condition, for a doctor. Oils vary enormously and some are unsuitable around pets.
As a general matter, ventilating a room is worth more than scenting it, and running anything continuously in a bedroom is worth thinking twice about.
Keep going
All free to read, all published here.