With Monday's big Alexa update, Amazon doles out a ton of new smarts for its voice assistant, including location-based routines, reminders and discovery; wait actions and more controls over timers; app notifications; and the ability to read and summarize your email vocally with voice-to-text replies.

For instance, you can now set up routines and reminders that trigger when you enter or leave an area; when you're out of reach of your smart speaker it will send a notification via the Alexa app. It can also use your location to find and call nearby businesses.

Time-based capabilities in routines introduce Wait Actions -- for example, a Night routine of  "Alexa, turn off the lights 30 minutes after entering Do Not Disturb" -- oh, and there's now a Do Not Disturb available within routines, too. You can set a music sleep timer, and control all timers via voice (including adding and subtracting time for an existing timer). 

If you're an Amazon Echo owner with kids, you'll soon be able to set up FreeTime routines -- an easy way to enforce "lights out!" time.

Finally, Alexa now has the ability to link to your Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail and Live.com accounts to read, summarize, respond to, notify and manage your email; it can even prioritize by importance based on your email settings and notify you if you've gotten email from a specific contact. Of course, this has huge privacy and security implications; at its least ominous, it could just boost the creep factor way up.

Initially, this feature will only be available in the US.

We reached out to Amazon for clarification as to how it plans to secure your email and use the wealth of information in it, but didn't immediately hear back.