Mi Watch update adds support for Amazon Alexa, camera shutter control, & brings new watch faces

Xiaomi has offered several great fitness bands in the past like the Mi Band 5 that carry a range of cool features at eye-watering low prices. But their smartwatches were kept limited to China alone.

This changed with the launch of the Mi Watch series in September last year. The watch offers a large high-quality AMOLED display, sleek design, tons of fitness data and sport profiles, paired with fantastic battery life.

Anyway, Xiaomi had claimed a while back that they’ll be adding camera shutter and Amazon Alexa support to the Mi Watch with a future update by the end of February 2021, since it was all missing out-of-the-box.

And true to their word, they have fulfilled their promise just in time.

As clear from above, the Xiaomi Mi Watch update carries a version number of 1.2.52 and has added Amazon Alexa and camera shutter control support.

With Amazon Alexa, a user can have a much more convenient control over other connected devices through the use of voice commands directly from the watch.

Additionally, the camera shutter feature allows one to click photos from their phone without actually touching it. Note that it has been marked as ‘experimental’ on the changelog and hence may be a bit rough around the edges.

The update also brings forward some optimizations like faster wake-up times and an option for turning on/off auto-pause during workouts, along with two new watch faces.

That said, the Amazon Alexa feature has not been made available in all regions, and trying to access the same will lead to the following message:

Nevertheless, if all goes well, the feature may be rolled out to other regions soon.

If you haven’t received the update yet then it could be quite possible that it is being rolled out in batches. But as soon as it’s available, there should be an automatic prompt on the Xiaomi Wear app to install the same.

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