Please check out my newest YouTube video, which looks at how you can stop specific songs from playing on any Amazon Alexa/Echo and Google Home device. This covers the two main methods discussed in an upcoming article on how to block certain songs on Echo and Google Home.
Video Transcript
Hey YouTube, it’s Tristan from Smart Home Point here. If you find that people are playing the same annoying song over and over on your Google home or your Alexa Dot device, then you might be wondering how you can stop this. As it turns out, you can use custom routines on both Google and Alexa. It’s really easy to do and it basically stops people from playing particular songs. Let’s take a look at how you do this.
Play ‘I am a gummy bear’. I’m a gummy bear by ‘Kids Now’, starting now on Amazon Music.
Okay so I’m gonna try and stop that behavior now and the way I’m going to do that is by launching my Amazon Alexa app and basically up on the top left we go to the menu and we click on ‘Routines’. Now this screen… when it finally loads… enables you to perform custom actions on your Alexa device and override the default behavior. So what I’m going to do is… I need to collect create routine. I can either click it up there, or here. I’ll just click it here because I don’t have any have any routines. Right, so my routine name will just be ‘stop annoying gummy bear song’… because I’ve heard it too many times. So click on next… so now I want to enter the trigger which is basically what this section is… [pause] so the trigger for this is… also when it loads… is a voice. So basically when somebody says ‘I am’… you know, ‘play I am a gummy bear’, then I want something to happen.
So in this case I’m gonna say ‘play I am a gummy bear’, click on next and then the action is what actually happens so I’ll click that. Now the default behavior is obviously to play a song, but I’m gonna overwrite that with this custom routine… so Alexa says ‘no this song is disabled… [can’t spell] disabled, sorry’, [mumbles] it’s probably bit harsh but there we are, whatever, click on next… so basically, yeah, we’re saying the name is up here… saying that’s just the name of the routine, then saying that that’s the action when somebody says that and then we are saying the trigger point is that Alexa should then say that instead of the default. Now the final thing we need to do is just choose the device, which in this case doesn’t matter… the study echo… so we click on save up on the top here and then you should get a message up there just saying it’ll take up to a minute to appear… umm… but now that’s done you can actually see that the routine is created here, and if you ever want to create another routine just click the button up on the top up here. Okay, so now I’m going to go back to my echo device and I’m going to test this out.
Okay let’s try this out: ‘play I am a gummy bear’. “No, this song is disabled, sorry”. Haha, that works!
‘Play I am a gummy bear’ “Sure, here’s gummy bear on Spotify”.
Okay, so let’s try disabling this on the… this song on the Google home app and let’s do that by launching the app. First thing you’ll notice is there’s a routines button and that’s exactly what we want to click. We’ll click on ‘Manage Routines’. Right so on the screen you’ve got a bunch of ready-made routines just to get you started but we don’t want that, we want to click on ‘Add a routine’. Right, now this is similar to the Alexa app as well. You firstly say what you want to do or did – you know the trigger word – then you say what will actually happen which in this case is going to be overriding the default behavior.
You can also do things like play a song or set a time of day but we don’t actually want that. So let’s get started by clicking ‘Add commands’ and we’re gonna say… uhm… it’s gonna be a Google… ‘play I am a gummy bear’ so click on okay. So when somebody says THAT, we want the assistant to… now, you’d think you’d actually say here ‘say no’ but that doesn’t actually work. What you actually need to do is click on ‘Browse popular actions’, you need to scroll all the way to the bottom down here, there’s a ‘Custom Responses’ section. You’re gonna click that now… you can click on edit and then we’re gonna say ‘no lol’. Don’t why but there we are, we’ll say that. Let’s click OK. Brilliant, now we can click on that and that’s pretty much all there is to it. So when somebody says that, you will say something. So let’s click on save at the top. You can see now we’ve got our custom routine that we just added. So let’s, uh, give that a shot.
‘Play I am a gummy bear’. “No, lol”. Okay that works as well!
Okay, so this is a really quick video today but it’s really useful and I don’t really see many other people talking about this online so I want to just shoot this video quickly and show you how to do this. If you like this video, please click the thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe. Thank you!
If you have any questions, feedback or suggestions about this article, please leave a comment below. Please note that all comments go into a moderation queue (to prevent blog spam). Your comment will be manually reviewed and approved by Tristan in less than a week. Thanks!