Making free phone calls on Alexa.

[Free At Last]

My son bought me some Amazon Alexa devices for Xmas, up until then I had no interest but am now finding them to be handy.
I have heard I can make 'free' phone calls to landlines and mobiles via these devices but I am always sceptical of 'free'.

If you have one, have you made 'free' phone calls?
 

[roundhouse]

15 minutes ago, Free At Last said:

My son bought me some Amazon Alexa devices for Xmas, up until then I had no interest but am now finding them to be handy.
I have heard I can make 'free' phone calls to landlines and mobiles via these devices but I am always sceptical of 'free'.

If you have one, have you made 'free' phone calls?
 

Yes use it quite often to phone landlines and have not seen any charges yet for doing so. Very handy if you want to keep doing something in the kitchen whilst talking or even continue modelling!

 

I think that you do need an Amazon Prime account though.

Edited January 1, 2020 by roundhouse

[Free At Last]

30 minutes ago, roundhouse said:

I think that you do need an Amazon Prime account though.

This something I don't have.

I suppose the only way I'll find out is by trying it. I'll check my mobile phone balance before and after as the Alexa app is linked to my phone.

[Free At Last]

Ok, so I've just made a call to a mobile via Alexa and can see no charge to my mobile credit, or anything on my Amazon account.

[Pete the Elaner]

29 minutes ago, Free At Last said:

Ok, so I've just made a call to a mobile via Alexa and can see no charge to my mobile credit, or anything on my Amazon account.

I wonder how they deal with the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) breakout then? You could do this with Skype but got charged when you called a PSTN destination, Skype to Skype being free.

I have not done that with my Echo yet (& to be honest don't know how to).

 

I used to call my ex GF on her Echo. It was handy because I had (have) 3 devices in different rooms & I think she had 2, so I could just dial by asking it to call her.

Google Home did not have this function. I am not sure if it has been added recently. The 2 devices have advantages over each other so having both is not as pointless as it seems.

 

Most mobile phones also have mobile data & most houses have a permanent internet connection, so I wonder how long it will be before we ditch PSTN & use IP telephony as the default method of sending calls?

As mentioned, Skype has been doing this for years, Calling a contact in Whatsapp used to initiate a PSTN call, but they revised this some time ago & it has used IP for some time now. It sounds much better for it too.