soundtrack for every activity in your life

Amazon's Alexa can now respond to your awkward request to play "hook-up music."

Building on the Echo smart speaker's core use as -- you know -- a speaker, Amazon on Thursday rolled out 500 new voice commands for the device to let people ask for music set to different activities. These commands are available for people that have Amazon Prime Music, which is included with a $99 Prime membership, and Amazon Music Unlimited, which costs $4 monthly for Echo owners.

The commands work as another small way for Amazon to connect its devices and services together, in hopes to keeping people subscribed to Prime as well as its monthly subscriptions such as Audible, Music Unlimited and Kindle Unlimited.

Alexa music commands already included requests to play specific kinds of genre, era or mood, and let people search for a song via lyrics. Meditation was the most requested activity that's now available. Amazon also threw in commands to play music for partying, eating, nap time and getting pumped. People can also combine music genres with activities to ask for, say, "classical music for sleeping" or "country music for running."

cnet