Information All You Need

Sathish Kumar S November 29, 2018

Amazon Fire TV is the most widely used streaming player in the world just because you can turn a dumb TV into a smart TV instantly. If you have got one of these smart TV gadget from Amazon then the following tips, tricks, hacks and hidden features will help you make the best out of them.

In case you don’t have one then it is time switch towards the Amazon Fire TV gadgets like the Amazon Fire TV and the Amazon Fire Stick 4K to experience your favorite series and movies in high definition with voice control remote. Let’s get into the cool tips and tricks you must try out on your Amazon Fire TV gadgets.

HOW TO MAKE GOOD USE OF ALEXA

The digital voice assistant Alexa is available both on the Fire TV Stick and Fire TV 4K, here is how you can make good use of this feature. For beginners, Amazon provides a handy guide for the Fire TV which details you about all that you can get from Alexa. To open that menu, navigate to Settings -> Alexa -> Things to Try. Common voice commands you can give are that you can control video playback by sounding “fast forward 20 seconds”, “rewind 10 seconds” and lots more.

DELETE VOICE RECORDINGS AS YOU WISH

These devices have been designed to recognize our voice patterns in order to assist us more accurately without any flaws. To do that, Amazon stores your entire voice search to your Fire TV by default. In case you are strict about the privacy of yourself and the family and felt uncomfortable knowing this then you can cancel out Amazon from recording your voice searches. In order to manage your voice search or recordings, you must click your device and then click Manage Voice Recordings, then Delete if you wish.

HOW ABOUT A PRIVATE MOVIE NIGHT

I do not know about others, but I myself have wondered years back that technology should enable us to use headphones to our TV and let us listen things privately sometimes. For good reasons, though that this is made possible with the Amazon Fire TV. You can enjoy the best quality experience by pairing your Bluetooth headphones with your TV. In order to do this, navigate to Settings -> Controllers and Bluetooth Devices -> Other Bluetooth Devices to sync your headphone with the Amazon Fire TV.

INSTALL YOUR FAVORITE APPS

We all have our favorite list of applications and some of them may not be from known sources. By default you are not allowed to install apps from unknown sources, but here is how to bypass that. For safety reasons, it is your responsibility to check the authority of the application before use strictly for your own privacy and digital safety. Navigate to the right side of the screen by using the Amazon Fire Remote, and scroll even right and click on open the Device, then scroll further to open Developer options and there you can enable “Apps from Unknown Sources” by switching to ON.

TURN OFF TARGETED ADVERTISING

One of the common things that hinder most of us is the advertisement while using internet gadgets. Amazon Fire TV is also inclusive of the club where we receive interest based targeted advertisements. This happens by the instruction that tells the device to use advertising ID to build profiles for advertising purpose which contains your interest based ads. This may not be that harmful but still you opt out of this in case you wish. To cancel out the interest-based ads you should navigate to Settings -> Preferences -> Advertising ID and switch the option to OFF.

PARENTAL CONTROLS FOR CHILD SAFETY

Since the gadget is placed right in front of everyone’s view on the household, one must take necessary precautions to setup parental control given that there is a child living in the same house. Parent control settings help the user to keep out the matured content which is rightly not suitable for younger audiences and it is best to keep those out of their reach. To setup parental control, you must choose the Settings -> Preferences -> Parental Controls and the Viewing Restriction where you can set it to matured audiences. For more safety purposes, you must set up a 4-digit PIN to keep the little ones away from accessing these unknowingly also.

MIRROR YOUR SMARTPHONE SCREEN ON THE TV

Mirroring your Smartphone screen on to the Amazon Fire TV is so easy, you can just long-press the home button on your Fire TV remote and get into the quick-access menu, and there you will find the mirroring option. This feature comes handy when you want to display your vacation pictures to the whole family, then you can mirror the pictures to your smart TV and enjoy scrolling them one by one. Never mind you are an Android or Apple user, this feature is compatible with most of the Smartphone devices out there.