If you have a CD player or phone wired into an older Echo speaker and used to tell Alexa to switch to it, that voice command is gone. Amazon has turned off voice control of the line-in on four older Echo models. The 3.5mm port itself still plays audio.
Saying “Alexa, play from line in” or “Alexa, set AUX input” now does nothing on these speakers. Only a handful of people were likely to notice, and Amazon said as much, but the change reaches hardware people already own.
| Echo model | Year |
|---|---|
| Echo Plus (2nd gen) | 2018 |
| Echo (3rd gen) | 2019 |
| Echo Studio (1st gen) | 2019 |
| Echo (4th gen) | 2020 |
The change surfaced in an email Amazon sent to customers, which Ars Technica reported. Amazon confirmed it and told the publication that very few customers use voice requests for AUX playback. It has not explained why it removed them.
Switching the input by hand
The Alexa app still has the control. Pick the speaker under Devices, open its AUX Audio setting and choose Line In to feed in an outside source, such as a phone or CD changer. The 3rd-gen Echo, 4th-gen Echo and 2nd-gen Echo Plus can also be set to Line Out to drive a wired speaker, while the first Echo Studio only takes input. After that, play and skip on the connected device itself; the old voice commands never controlled it. Bluetooth is the other route.
Newer Echo models have mostly dropped the port, so upgrading would mean losing wired input altogether.
