Grading Alexa+ on a Curve
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
I've probably read a dozen such reviews by now of the not-exactly-new-any-longer but still not-exactly-widely-available-months-later Alexa+, they all seem to wrap their thoughts in this narrative that the new version is an upgrade, but nearly everything they're writing suggests that it's a downgrade.
This week, Amazon will launch new Echo hardware designed to supercharge Alexa Plus, the AI-powered upgrade to its voice assistant. I’ve been using Alexa Plus for the last few months as part of its Early Access program, and while the new assistant is off to a promising start, it’s still clearly a work in progress.
To fix Alexa, Amazon had to break it apart and rebuild it. The result is a hybrid smart home assistant and personal assistant, as well as Amazon’s answer to ChatGPT. Right now, it’s not doing any of those things well enough.
Read: it's a poor performing smart home assistant, a poor-performing personal assistant, and a poor-performing chatbot. Cool. Cool. Cool.
Yes, we all know what Amazon had to do after making the mistake of thinking they could do it without doing that. But clearly there was still work to be done and yet they shipped it anyway. Why? Internal pressure? For all his talk of seeking absolute product perfection – which rang hallow – it feels like Panos Panay made the call that it was better to get something out there in the wild and iterate on the fly rather than waiting for perfection.
In a vacuum, that's fine. But Amazon doesn't operate in a vacuum in this space, they operate in millions of homes! Also, they had to be watching Apple's own AI shitshow unfolding (with some undoubtedly similar issues with upgrading Siri) and recognizing they needed to avoid that PR headache. All of which seems pretty clearly why the roll-out has been so slow and limited.
Today, running on underpowered hardware and with what feels like a surface-level integration into my smart home, Alexa Plus often leaves me frustrated. There’s power under that hood, but it feels largely inaccessible. The assistant desperately needs something to make it more compelling — and better hardware could be the answer.
I mean, maybe! But it sure doesn't sound like the hardware is the issue here. The answer will only come if Alexa+ is itself upgraded alongside any new devices.
Recently, Alexa and I chatted about the best ways to use my smart home gadgets to their full potential. It suggested possible routines, built the automations, tweaked them based on my feedback, and tested them — all in minutes, with no fiddling in the (still clunky) Alexa app. It even helped me set up a new air purifier and folded it into one of those routines.
But there are issues. Alexa Plus is noticeably slower, with some requests taking up to 15 seconds for a response. While turning on lights or adjusting a thermostat is fast enough (I assume due to using local connections over Matter), waiting for over 10 seconds for the weather or a song to play is tiresome.
Some basic features that used to work reliably now don’t or require new phrasing every time. My struggles to control my Alexa-enabled coffee machine persist, and I can’t get Alexa to consistently turn on my bathroom fan for a set period of time.
I used to say, “Turn on the bathroom fan for 15 minutes,” and it did it. Now, Alexa Plus tells me it has to create a routine to do that, and then doesn’t run that routine. Or it says, “Sure,” turns the fan on, but never turns it off. I’ve tried this a dozen times and haven’t had a consistent response yet.
Clunky. Slower. Tiresome. Unreliable. Inconsistent. Broken.
I mean, what about any of this sounds good? The fact that Alexa can handle multiple tasks at once? Can she though?!
One surreal moment: after weeks of Alexa Plus’ new voice, the old Alexa suddenly surfaced when the system hit a snag. “Sorry, something went wrong,” it said in that stiff, familiar tone. For a second, I wondered — is the old Alexa still in there, trying to get out?
That's a fun notion. That our old friend Alexa that actually worked is trapped in the cloud somewhere, a true ghost in the machine.
The next several paragraphs go on making excuses for Amazon here, but again, it all just reads as pretty inexcusable. If they weren't ready to ship an Alexa+ that could take over for Alexa, they shouldn't have. Or they should have shipped it as something else, perhaps a new chatbot – with a different name – to have the fun conversational back-and-forths Panay clearly wanted. You could have seen a world in which "Alexa" invoked the tasks and routines while "Axel" could have been your new buddy to chat with. (Or perhaps even better, how about, I don't know, "Claude"?) It's silly to have two, of course. And eventually they merge, but not until the system is fully ready. Which it is clearly not.
That's seemingly closer to the approach Google has been taking with Gemini and their OG "Assistant". They've been slowly but surely swapping the engine mid-flight and we may see the culmination of that tomorrow – one day after Amazon's event, when Google is hosting their own event related to their Home devices.
As an Alexa household for years now, my hope is that Amazon isn't just rushing to beat Google out the door here. Or maybe they think Google hasn't actually solved the whole get-a-non-deterministic-chatbot-to-do-deterministic-things challenge either? Or maybe they've just been holding back a version of Alexa+ that is actually ready for prime-time now? But I'm pretty skeptical as all of this was extremely predictable.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler