By default, the Echo doesn’t provide any kind of audio signal before or after you give commands. It’s one of those things that’s really useful, but (for some reason) it’s ever-so-slightly buried within the Alexa app.
Start by opening up the Alexa app on your phone and tap on the menu button in the top-left corner of the screen.
Tap on “Settings”.
Select your Echo at the top of the screen (or if you have multiple Echos, select one that you want to enable the feature on).
Next, tap on “Sounds & Notifications”.
Under the section “Request Sounds”, tap on the toggle switch under “Start of Request”. This will emit a short audio tone after you say “Alexa”. You can also turn on “End of Request”, which will play the tone after it recognizes your Alexa command.
Keep in mind that you’ll have to enable this feature manually on each of your Echo devices that you want it enabled on—it’s not a universal feature that gets enabled on all of your Echo devices at once. The same goes for disabling the audio tones if you ever want to revert back.
Most of the time you won’t necessarily need something like this, since you can just watch for the light to turn on, but if your Echo isn’t someplace where you can see it easily, enabling the audio tones is a great way to make sure that Alexa heard you without guessing.
