Just about a year ago we announced our expansion of White Noise into the world of the Amazon Echo. Since then, our sounds have been streamed over 500,000 times with the White Noise Alexa Skill! It was great to gain early support for our skill and today we are excited to announce new sounds and features for the White Noise Alexa skill!
The White Noise Alexa Skill has been updated to include the following sounds: air conditioner, air plane, blue noise, box fan, brown noise, extreme rain, grey noise, light rain, heavy rain, ocean waves, pink noise, purple noise, rain on lake, rain on tent, stream, and white noise. All of these popular sounds can be streamed without gaps in audio for up to 10 hours. We also added a sound catalog, previewing of each sound, statistics, and more. Try using these new commands with the White Noise Alexa Skill:
“Ask White Noise what’s new?”
“Ask White Noise for the sound catalog“
“Ask White Noise to preview rain on tent”
“Ask White Noise to play box fan for 10 hours”
“Ask White Noise for my stats“
Costs of running a streaming service
As our skill has grown in popularity, the costs for us to provide this streaming service are far greater than expected. We tried to lower our costs with better compression, but even our best efforts couldn’t keep the costs from reaching thousands per month. It was time for a tough decision–do we remove our skill or ask our customers for help? We decided to ask for your help and have introduced a Premium Subscription. It’s only $1.99 per month and will help pay for the massive bandwidth costs we are incurring from our cloud providers.
Subscription vs one-time fee
It’s important to understand how our White Noise Alexa skill is different than our White Noise mobile apps. The Alexa skill is a streaming service whereas the mobile apps play sounds from local storage without using the network. The Amazon Echo does not have local storage so we have to stream the sounds to you every time you ask to play a sound. One sound played for 10 hours is over 1/2 gigabyte (500,000,000 bytes) which is why our bandwidth costs are so high. This is why a one-time fee wouldn’t be sustainable.
Try 50 hours of our service for free
The White Noise Alexa Skill provides listening to all our sounds at no cost for up to 50 hours. This way you can experience the audio quality and hear that there are no audio gaps in playback. Audio gaps will wake you up! No other Alexa skill provides this kind of functionality. After 50 hours, users will be prompted to upgrade to our Premium Subscription service. After subscribing you’ll receive unlimited streaming as well as higher quality audio. Thanks for your support!
Download the White Noise Alexa Skill for your Echo devices today!