Amazon Echo now takes voice commands for Pandora and Spotify

If you accepted an invitation to buy Amazon’s Echo speaker, you’ve noticed that the device didn’t have a vast musical vocabulary at first — you could tell it to play iHeartRadio or Prime Music tunes, and that’s about it. You’ll have a better time of things from now on, though. Amazon is rolling out an update that lets you use your voice to steer iTunes, Pandora radio or Spotify on your mobile device. It’s not super-sophisticated, but you no longer have to reach for your phone just to skip tracks. And in case millions more songs won’t keep you entertained, there’s also a “Simon says” command that you can use to prank people (or simply tell them something) from across the home. We’d argue that the biggest upgrade to the Echo would be getting to buy one, but these new features will do in a pinch.