Set this up tonight and you never choose again. You say two words, the room goes quiet, and the music is already playing. It takes about two minutes, it works with any Echo speaker, and it costs nothing.
A routine is a rule your speaker remembers. You pick the words, it does the rest — starts the playlist, sets the volume low, and switches itself off hours later so nothing is still playing in an empty room at six in the morning.
Tap the + in the corner to start a new one. Name it anything — "Goodnight" is fine.
Type the words you want to say. These are yours to pick, so choose something you will actually say out loud in a dark room:
Alexa, goodnightSome people prefer "Alexa, bedtime" or "Alexa, sleep now". Any of them work. Short is better.
Search for Deep Sleep — All Night and pick Mellowly as the artist. Choose your music service in the same panel — Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Music all work here.
This is the part that matters: because you are choosing the playlist from a list now, your speaker never has to understand the name later. It just plays it.
In the same action, set the speaker volume to 3. Low enough to disappear, loud enough to be there. Worth a try at 2 or 4 on the first night to find yours.
Set the wait to 4 hours, then add a stop. By then you are well asleep, and nothing is playing to an empty room at dawn.
Say your words. If the music starts, it will start every night from now on, and you are done thinking about it.
No email, no sign-up. It just tells me the instructions work, which is the only way I find out whether they do.
You can ask for it by name, and some nights you will. But a name has to be heard correctly in a dark room by someone already half asleep, and "Mellowly" sounds a lot like "mellow" — which is a word your speaker also uses for moods, so it does not always land on us.
A routine skips the problem entirely. You chose the playlist from a list while you were awake, so there is nothing left to mishear.
A playlist that ends hands you to whatever the app plays next, and that is usually somebody else, often with drums. Every Mellowly sleep playlist now runs past nine hours so it outlasts the night — and the four-hour stop in your routine means it ends on your terms rather than theirs.
The routine is the one that survives, because it removes the decision. But if you do not have a speaker:
One more thing worth doing while you are here. Follow the playlist in Spotify — the little heart or the Follow button. A followed playlist sits in your own library, so you never have to find it again, and it keeps working even if you change speakers.
On your phone, the nearest thing to a routine is a bedtime alarm that opens the playlist, or simply leaving the stream on a tab. If you use Spotify, there is one setting worth changing tonight either way: Settings → Playback → Autoplay, off. That stops anything else starting when a playlist finishes.