Does Emo AI Dream of Mundane Tasks?

Lo! A mythical beast! An Alexa+ review! In the wild! And it's in The New York Times no less! Okay, technically it's in Wirecutter. And technically it's just a preview. And there have been a couple of these trickling out ever so slowly. And Amazon now says that over a million people have access to the service. But, well, only a few such articles have appeared. So that either implies that Amazon is being very careful how to dish these out – the first preview/review came from someone the company probably didn't realize was a USA Today columnist – or, people just don't really care enough to write about it. Judging from these initial takes, the truth is probably somewhere in between.

From these couple previews – because what else do we have to go on? – it sounds like Alexa+ is both pretty conversational, as promised, and pretty buggy, as expected. The reviewers think it's mostly better, but worse at some things mainly because of the bugs. None of it sounds like a slam dunk of an upgrade, at least not yet. And in some ways, you could see how it might be viewed as a downgrade by some people. As a recent, perhaps slightly too glowing profile of Amazon's Panos Panay made clear, he's not going to fully release Alexa+ until she's ready for prime time. It may be a while yet, it seems.

While reading these reviews, a thought popped into my head: what if this is all a mistake for Amazon? I don't mean the bugs, as those will undoubtedly be resolved. I mean the overall strategy for Alexa here...