That said, it should only take you a couple of minutes, and it's totally worth the effort. Setting up your Amazon Echo Show smart display to appear as a security camera in the Alexa app is a bit trickier than enabling most features - for security reasons, you have to set it up on the device itself, not from within the app. In other words, this is a pretty hot-off-the-presses new feature. At first, only the new Echo Show 10 could pull it off, but a recent update seems to have changed all that and now the first-gen Echo Show 5 and Echo Show 8 have a Home Monitoring setting (presumably, so will the updated Show 5 and 8 when the arrive June 9) Speaking of the new Echo Show 10, it actually wasn't until the latest iteration of Amazon's flagship smart display that this feature even appeared in the Alexa app as an option for other devices. If you have an Echo Show 5 in the bedroom, you'll be glad to know it has a physical shutter button to block the camera.
Plus, if you have the latest Echo Show 10, you can not only view the camera feed, but you can pan the room left to right (although, unfortunately, not up and down). But if you just want to check in on things from time to time without having to check your appearance first, Home Monitoring is perfect, and it might just replace that security camera you were thinking of buying.
