How to Connect Alexa to Pandora

It's quite easy to listen to Pandora using your Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, or other Alexa device. In fact, with the ability to tell your Alexa whether or not you want to listen using Pandora, the two services work very well together. You can even rate music as it plays, which helps Pandora cater the custom radio station to your personal tastes. Pandora Radio is awesome because it does a great job of linking similar music, so it really does go hand-in-hand (or perhaps voice-in voice) with Alexa.

To connect to Pandora from your Alexa device, you need to link your Pandora account to Alexa. You can do this in the Amazon Alexa app on your smartphone, or through the Alexa website. Once you've linked your Pandora account, you can begin playing Pandora stations immediately.

You can download the Alexa app from the Apple App Store or for Android devices on Google Play.

Don't have your smartphone handy? Don't worry. You can also customize the music settings on your Alexa device using your laptop or desktop PC by logging into the Alexa website.

Once you've linked your Pandora account, you can immediately start playing Pandora radio using your Amazon Echo or other Alexa device. You simply need to tell Alexa you want to use Pandora instead of the default music service:

• "Alexa, Play [station] on Pandora." Using Pandora on Alexa is as simple as adding the "on Pandora" keyword phrase to your command. Pandora stations are usually by the band or song used to create them, but if you added a custom name to the radio station, you can use that as well.
• "Alexa, Play [song or artist] on Pandora." What about creating a new radio station? It's as simple as playing one of your current stations. Simply name the song or band you want to use as a seed for the station. If Alexa doesn't find an existing station, you'll be asked if you want to create a new one.

• "Alexa, thumbs up!" You can rate a song with a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" command.
• "Alexa, what song is this?" The great thing about Pandora is discovering new music. If you hear a song you like but are unsure of the artist or song name, just ask Alexa "who is playing?" or "what song is this?"
• "Alexa, skip." This one is a universal music command that works with most music services and skips to the next song.

A few other generic music commands include:

• "Alexa pause"
• "Alexa play"
• "Alexa stop"
• "Alexa turn volume to [number from 1 to 10]"
• "Alexa volume up" or "Alexa volume down."

You can use Pandora as your default music player, essentially meaning you can stop saying "on Pandora" when asking for a specific radio station.

Unfortunately, Alexa doesn't assume whether or not you mean a station when requesting an artist, so you will still need to add "station" to the command; For example, "Alexa, play Beatles station." If you simply ask her to play "Beatles," she will still shuffle Beatles songs using Amazon Music.