Now Alexa can ask Newton to check mails

With hundreds of Skills being added to Amazon’s Alexa on a regular basis, email management application, Newton, claims to have been added as a new skill to Amazon’s Alexa. According to the company a user can read receipts, undo send, send later as well as access connected apps and has features like one-click unsubscribe through Amazon’s Echo device. Since Echo itself does not support notifications, users can can activate Alexa from the Newton app, only via the Alexa command such as: Mark as read, Delete, Archive, Mark as spam, Snooze till later, Snooze till afternoon, Snooze till tomorrow, Snooze till day after tomorrow, Snooze till Saturday, Snooze till Monday, Snooze to Desktop, Nothing. A couple of months ago, intelligence layer for email, Notion.ai also integrated with Alexa for reading mails and it acted as a bridging technology between Amazon’s Alexa Service and the inbox. Newton states that it differs by offering a solid email experience.

“Notion is very much an AI application and conceptual. Newton is robust and offers a smooth experience, this is reflected in the Alexa skill,” said the Newton team.

How to set it up

It’s a prerequisite to have Newton on the user’s primary device

1. Search for Newton on Alexa app and enable it
2. Tap on Link account and the user will be directed to the Newton OAuth page
3. Post logging into Newton the user has to authorize Alexa to access emails
4. The user can then tell Alexa to ask Newton if there is any mail.

How to talk to Alexa for accessing Newton

The user can ask Alexa to check with Newton if there are any new mails. On confirmation, Alexa can ask the user to read the mail and post reading the mail will ask for commands to further progress with the actions. At that point the user can .mark as read, delete, archive, mark as spam and chose between multiple snooze functions. The user also has a choice to say ‘Nothing’ to move to the next mail. One can also interrupt Alexa while reading the mail to go to and fro with what is being read and read previous mail. The user can also ask Alexa to stop and also check mails as soon as it hits the inbox. Apart from features like scheduled sending, snoozing, sender profile background, undo send, and saving email to notepad applications, Newton claims to support Gmail, Yahoo Mail, iCloud, Office365, Google Apps, Microsoft Exchange, Hotmail/ Outlook.com and other IMAP mail clients. Newton states that the company tied up with Amazon first seeing its fast development in product and might be planning a tie up with Google Home soon, with similar functions.