Fix Echo “Having trouble understanding you right now”

By Bradly Spicer •  Updated: 05/27/19 •  3 min read

If you’ve landed on this post, it means you’ve had the same issue I’ve encountered.

Rather than spending countless hours looking for a solution, hopefully, I can condense it down for you! The symptoms of this issue are a red light and Alexa constantly telling you:

“Sorry, I’m having trouble understanding you right now. Please try a little later.”

Steps to try:

Checking if Alexa is actually on your network

This gets a little more technical, so you’ll need to bare with me on this one and I’ll try my best to resolve this. You’ll need to go to your routers admin panel (For myself I put 192.168.0.254 into my browser URL). If you need to find this, simply google “Admin Login for ” then add your router name.

Once done, hopefully your router will show you what devices are connected, here is the following for me WITHOUT Alexa Plugged in:

Alexa Device Not on Network
This is my connected devices without Alexa showing

Then from here, you will see a device titled “Unknown”, Alexa doesn’t assign a device name from my tests. At the moment you’ll see my other devices (One of which is an Amazon Alexa Device). However when I plug another one in:

Alexa Device on Network
There is a new Device Name, with a new MAC Address, the Alexa is connected!

If the device is on the same network, it means it’s working your end network wise and is likely related to the Amazon AWS Servers. It’s worth noting that the way Alexa works is that it sends data from your voice command to their server, waits for a response and sends it back.

“Having trouble understanding you right now” should not be a problem anymore, saying that, if you do have any more issues. My email is open to be contacted and we can look in to working together to resolve this! 🙂

Bradly Spicer

I'm a Smart Home and IT Enthusiast that loves to check out new technology and gadgets! I enjoy reading your experiences and news, so if you want to share anything or chat smart homes, definitely send me an email!