People love their sound skills. It’s the most successful Alexa use case and it never ceases to amaze me. Props to Voice Apps and Invoked Apps for cornering the market.
We recently changed our ranking formula, so this month we also have two less successful skills (Apple Music and Sirius XM). These skills are extremely popular in terms of user engagement, but they are surprisingly not very well reviewed. I am surprised two major audio platforms would release Alexa skills that are either very buggy (Sirius) or difficult to use (Apple). It’s even more strange that Apple would release something without its classic user experience sheen…
What do you think? Should the top skills only include the best rated skills or should we include the most rated ones too?
Sleep and Relaxation Sounds by Voice Apps, LLC. – 4.8 out of 5, 13140 ratings, 13077 reviews
Sleep Sounds lets you play ambient sounds to help you sleep peacefully or block out unwanted noise at work or home.With over 125 high quality sounds to choose from, you’ll be able to sleep better, stay focused, study without interruption, relax quickly, meditate more effectively, and get your baby to go to sleep faster!
Random review: This is a decent skill to enable for Echo. Upon opening up you can ask Echo to list the sounds however she reads them so fast it can be difficult to keep trackThis skill needs some work as once you open it you need to issue it the direct name of the sound you want immediately it asks “What can I do for you?”. Otherwise it will look for a band by that name to shuffle music for. It also does not really have the capability to switch between sounds, you will need to tell Echo to open sleep sounds each time and name the sound you wish to switch to.(4 out of 5)
Sleep Sounds: Rain Sounds by Invoked Apps LLC – 4.8 out of 5, 9857 ratings, 9853 reviews
Rain Sounds plays ambient sounds to help you sleep, relax, meditate, relieve stress, or block out unwanted noise.
Random review: Per the description, it is an “ambient noise loop of light rainfall”. To the reviewer that gave it a low rating because it doesn’t have thunder… it wasn’t advertised as such. It does what it says on the tin, and it does it well. I can listen to this while I am working without my dogs freaking out about the thunder. It doesn’t help to give a bad review to a skill just because it isn’t exactly what you were looking for. (5 out of 5)
Sleep Sounds: Ocean Sounds by Invoked Apps LLC – 4.9 out of 5, 6788 ratings, 6783 reviews
Ocean Sounds plays ambient sounds to help you sleep, relax, meditate, relieve stress, or block out unwanted noise.
Random review: I use this every night when I go to bed. I have Alexa start the sound, then I tell it to loop, then I tell Alexa to set a sleep timer for a certain length of time. She reports back that the sleep timer has been set, then resumes playing the ocean sounds. It really helps me wind down and relax. This is my favorite skill so far. (5 out of 5)
Sleep Sounds: Thunderstorm Sounds by Voice Apps, LLC. – 4.9 out of 5, 5294 ratings, 5292 reviews
Thunderstorm Sounds helps you sleep peacefully or block out unwanted noise at work or home.
Random review: This used to work wonderfully but here lately it will play for roughly 45 seconds and then abruptly stop. I first suspecyed my internet connection but everything else works just fine. I am able to successfully and continuously play anything else with no trouble but this keeps stopping. I would gladly update my review if the app became usable again. (1 out of 5)
Sleep Sounds: White Noise by Voice Apps, LLC. – 4.7 out of 5, 4475 ratings, 4472 reviews
White Noise helps you sleep peacefully or block out unwanted noise at work or home.You’ll be able to sleep better, stay focused, study without interruption, relax quickly, meditate more effectively, and get your baby to go to sleep faster!
Random review: Two days in a row I’ve quietly asked Alexa to play white noise because I can’t sleep at 2 AM. Two days in a row this stupid app has woken my wife up by responding with “…please take the time to review this app, because it would really help us out…”
There you go. Thanks for the impatient requests at 2 AM. Is this what you wanted? (1 out of 5)
Sleep Sounds by Invoked Apps LLC – 4.7 out of 5, 3303 ratings, 3301 reviews
Sleep Sounds plays calming sound loops to help you fall asleep faster, sleep better, relax, meditate, or drown out distracting noises.
Random review: Purchased a Lifetime Membership in August to access the Premium Sounds and loved the Alexa Skill. This January, somehow lost access to the Premium Sounds. Emailed Support and have yet to receive a response. Guess Lifetime = 5 Months. (1 out of 5)
Sleep Sounds: Box Fan Sounds by Voice Apps, LLC. – 4.9 out of 5, 2746 ratings, 2745 reviews
Box Fan Sounds helps you sleep peacefully or block out unwanted noise at work or home.You’ll be able to sleep better, stay focused, study without interruption, relax quickly, meditate more effectively, and get your baby to go to sleep faster!
Random review: I especially like the fact that Alexa still can hear me when the fan sounds is on. That is nice. However, the program forced me to give a five star review, and said if I didn’t it would not play all night. I actually did give a five star review, but the program could not match my review with the skill, and so it quits at night, waking me up. Very disappointing. 1) Don’t coerce me into a great rating, and 2) if you do coerce me, you better follow through. I’ll probably uninstall this skill. There are others. (5 out of 5)
Sleep Sounds: Babbling Brook by Invoked Apps LLC – 4.9 out of 5, 2491 ratings, 2488 reviews
Babbling Brook plays ambient sounds to help you sleep, relax, meditate, relieve stress, or block out unwanted noise.
Random review: I sleep with a sound machine, a fan, and in a dark room. I have PTSD and insomnia. This is one sound I play on loop and it helps my anxiety and keeps me asleep. I find it peaceful. Other sounds have annoyed me or kept me awake. This is the first I’ve looped and it really helps me.
I wanted to add that I found this app on my Alexa app and asked my Echo dot to play it on my nightstand. It seems to default to 60 mins if you play it without any other instructions. I now ask my echo, “Play Babbling Brook”….after it starts to play, I ask it to loop the song. Once on loop, it will play all night until you turn it off.
I have downloaded other sounds/apps and they did not keep me asleep. The reason, once the sound ended and started again, it was very obvious and the song ending and starting again woke me up due to the silence in between. This one pretty much goes right back into the song without hearing silent areas for seconds. (5 out of 5)
SiriusXM by SiriusXM – 2.6 out of 5, 3540 ratings, 3538 reviews
Listen to 300+ channels of great SiriusXM® programming — including 100+ Xtra channels designed for any mood, occasion, and activity.
Random review: I just read some of the reviews to finally realize that the Sirius XM problems I am experiencing is an issue with everyone. I thought the agents should know this and stop taking us through hours of fruitless troubleshooting. By the way, when is this going to be resolved? I just tested it and it is still not working. (1 out of 5)
Apple Music by Apple Inc. – 2.1 out of 5, 2997 ratings, 2989 reviews
Stream over 50 million songs ad-free from Apple Music.
Random review: IMPORTANT : to listen to music match songs that are not part of apple music you have to add them to a playlist (at least thats the workaround as of 12/16/18) but they DO work. just make a seperate playlist for each album if thats what you want. For example, while I am writing this, I am listening to Tool through my echo from apple music. Tool is not normally available on apple music. I own the CDs and ripped them to mp3, then I used Apple’s iTunes Music Match to add Tool to my Apple Music Library. I created a playlist with their albums and it lets me play the playlist on my echo. Hopefully that helps because I saw a lot of reviews that said it didn’t work.
MY ORIGINAL REVIEW: Finally! It works much better for me than amazon music did. amazon music couldn’t understand certain band or song names even though the artists were in their library (for example 65daysofstatic) but apple music has understood every request i’ve made so far. Also, Apple has the best hand curated playlists out of all of the music streaming services. (5 out of 5)
