Watch video games on your Amazon Echo Show with Twitch skill – CNET

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Insert your favorite video game stream here.

Tyler Lizenby/CNET

If you like watching video games in action, the screen on the Amazon Echo Show just became more useful.

Twitch launched an Alexa skill on Monday that will let you tune into your favorite video game streams and use Amazon’s digital assistant to find new streamers and games to watch. The skill will let you search for channels by game or category, and it can even notify you when your favorite streamers go live.

Twitch is a video game broadcasting service owned by Amazon. Participants broadcast themselves playing popular video games, and you can tune in to watch skillful, insightful or otherwise entertaining gamers in action. While you watch them play, most broadcasters equip a camera with a microphone so you can also see and hear them react to the game.

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The skill will work on any Alexa-enabled device. Listening to a broadcast on a smart speaker such as the Amazon Echo might not be quite as useful as watching it on the screen-equipped Show, but any Alexa device will be able to take advantage of Twitch’s notifications, which you can fine-tune in your Twitch account.

We were a little underwhelmed with the capabilities of the Show’s screen when we reviewed it, but this skill will hold a lot of appeal for the increasingly popular world of video game streaming.