Alexa Plus is better at running my home, but it’s not ready to run my life

Of all the things Alexa Plus can do, I never expected it to create me cry. Since my son remaining for college, the Echo Show in my agency has been making then-and-now photo montages: the toddler alongside his archetypal tennis racket next to the captain of his varsity team; me hugging him as a tween beside me hugging him as a young man. I’ve teared up additional than once. But afterward comes the ad, a full-screen photo of a hideous brown leather recliner. I go from nostalgic joy to irritation in an instant.

That beautiful much sums up my twelvemonth alongside Alexa Plus. One infinitesimal it volition do item earnestly impressive; the next, it acts akin it doesn’t cognize who I am.

A twelvemonth in, Alexa Plus is the finest astute residence aide I’ve tested: It’s uncomplicated to conversation to, handles routines and multistep commands, and helps in the kitchen. But Amazon’s attempts to extend it into a personal aide are underbaked and frustrating, and the ads on the Echo Show astute displays are out of control.

I tested Alexa Plus alongside an Echo Show 11 in my kitchen, Pops and Dots about my house, and a Show 15 and 8 in my office. I use sound commands to authority my astute residence devices, assistance me alongside timers and recipes, add events to my calendar and groceries to my buying list, and occasionally command item from Amazon. I use the screen-based devices as photo frames, for viewing camera feeds, and as touchscreen controllers for my astute home.

A lot has improved. Smart residence control, routines, broad queries, calendar management, and buying are light-years onward of pre-AI Alexa, mostly since the new Alexa understands me better. The big commitment of LLM-powered sound assistants was the capability to say what you desire without using stilted, exact nomenclature. In my testing, that’s proven out. My family uses Alexa additional now than they used to, and I akin being capable to provision additional broad instructions, akin “Alexa, create it brighter in here” and “Alexa, I’m cold,” and it knows what to do.

It’s additionally now faster and additional reliable. When I started evaluation the new assistant, I ran into a litany of issues, from misunderstood commands to messed-up routines and extremely dilatory responses. Today, questions concerning the climate or broad cognition and commands akin environment a timer execute in three to five seconds, a big alter from the 10 to 15 seconds I saw in 2025. When it gets a petition incorrect the archetypal time, a follow-up now normally fixes it. I can say “Lock the forefront door, rotate off the lights, rotate downward the thermostat, and inform the robot to spotless downstairs,” and it happens promptly, without any rear talk.

Alexa is additionally much improved at answering questions, particularly in the kitchen. Talking alongside it is easier now that you can conversation conversationally and don’t have to reiterate the awaken term — but I had to toggle to the new Brief character mode following one too many superlatives concerning my buying catalog ( “Oooh, that volition create for one spicy salsa!).

I lately snapped a image of my friend’s Dutch baby formula during in England and sent it to Alexa via the app. When I got home, I asked Alexa to assistance me chef it; the aide pulled up the reformatted recipe, and we chatted rear and onward effortlessly during I cooked. I could ask, “What heat should I preheat the oven?” and “How many ounces are 160 grams?” and it would recall we were discussing the formula and provision the correct answer. Alexa motionless sometimes forgets what it’s doing, and getting rear to the formula can be tricky, but it’s the finest voice-assistant cooking cognition I’ve tested.

I’ve additionally established Alexa additional helpful for broad knowledge, item it used to be awful at, and calendar administration has rotate into additional reliable, too. I can now email and upload documents and photos to Alexa Plus, and it can import events from them into my calendar. I added my daughter’s complete academy agenda that way. Shopping is additionally hugely improved. I uploaded 10 screenshots of sewing supplies from my daughter’s instructor to the Alexa app, and it established all the items and added them to my Amazon cart, preservation me a lot of time.

My favorite upgrade is creating Alexa astute residence routines by voice. I think of item I desire my residence to do, inform Alexa, and it does it. I wanted the cord lights on the veranda to rotate on whenever I stroll outside; Alexa set up a regular using the motion sensor on the Ring camera. I can additionally modify routines on the fly. One night, my female came out of her washroom complaining, “The lights kept shutting off.” I told Alexa to alter the “Hallway washroom light” regular to close off following 30 minutes alternatively of 15, and it fixed it.

But it took a lengthy period to get here. Like many Alexa users, I had a lot of specialized debt in my astute home, and as a reviewer, my Alexa app was a graveyard of zombie devices. To get Alexa Plus to activity correctly for me, I had to rebuild my astute residence from scratch, deleting all my old Alexa skills and routines and slaying deceased and copy devices. It took months, literally. I’ve had to re-add 55 Hue devices six times complete the former year. And during Alexa has improved, the Alexa app has not. Adding, deleting, and moving multiple devices is motionless deeply painful, and the app cognition is Alexa’s biggest flaw.

What I really desire is Alexa Plus to oversee all that for me so I never have to contact the app. From environment up gadgets to troubleshooting issues, Alexa have to be capable to put devices in the correct area and, if item isn’t working, fig it out. I desire it to oversee my astute residence for me. That is an aide I would pay prosperity for.

While Alexa Plus has made a lot of improvements, there are three big issues, one of which may create you flat-out not desire to use the service: ads, inconsistency, and mostly unsuccessful attempts at being a individual assistant.

Display ads are out of control. Every Show equipment is now a rotating advertisement in my residence for Amazon goods. Even if you rotate off all the homescreen content (the rotating display on the displays), you motionless get ads interspersed between your photos and the clock. Timing is random; I can see one an hr on the Echo Show 5 in the area and afterward go a entire day without seeing one on the 11 in my kitchen, but they’re fairly changeless on the Show 8 in my office.

Daniel Rausch, VP of Alexa & Echo at Amazon, tells me these ads are curated and designed to be relevant. “When it’s done well, an ad should display up alongside item helpful at fair the correct moment,” he said. But it hasn’t felt curated to me; among the attractiveness products, car accessories, snacks, furniture, health supplements, and astute residence equipment that have assaulted my eyeballs, nothing has been item I wanted to buy. Even worse, Amazon lately added video ads.

There is now a fix, but it volition disbursal you: Amazon’s new Photo Gallery Unlimited feature removes the ads from the homescreen for $2.99 per duration per device. If you don’t desire to pay monthly to evade ads, I would stick alongside the Echo speakers.

Alexa Plus is motionless inconsistent at executing additional complex requests. This was a big matter in my first evaluation and has improved, but not gone away. The change from the dependable but restricted command-and-control architecture of the old Alexa to the LLM-powered generative AI has introduced a lot of uncertainty: Alexa Plus sometimes has to conjecture at what you want.

For example, Alexa still can’t reliably create a cup of coffee. I have an Alexa-capable Bosch 800 Series coffee machine alongside a particular integration that gives Alexa additional granular controls, including making a particular drink, specified as a coffee grande. This plant most of the period — a big betterment complete my first testing. But the another day I asked Alexa to create me a coffee grande, and it replied, “I’d affection to, but I’m caller out of arms and a coffee maker.” I asked again, and it said, “Sure, here’s a coffee grinder,” displaying an AI-generated depiction of a coffee grinder.

Alexa Plus motionless struggles alongside timely information. Asking it whenever England next played in the football World Cup in June nearly made me young female kickoff, and final duration whenever I asked what conduit an Ohio State–Illinois football equivalent was on, it offered to set up a reminder for a equivalent that had already started.

Getting dates and times incorrect is not a trait I desire in a individual assistant, which is what Amazon is pushing Alexa Plus as. Instead of a stoic, disembodied voice, I’m now greeted all dawn by a perky brace of digital hands proffering a cheerful emoji and a row akin “Hey Jen, inform me what I can do for you today?” on the Echo Show in my kitchen.

Perkiness apart — I’m English; we don’t do perky — I’m not against Alexa doing additional for me. It’s fair that the aide has unsuccessful to complete multiple tasks I’ve stated it. Most of these new agentic features, including integrations alongside Thumbtack, OpenTable, and Ticketmaster, awareness underbaked and mostly a discarded of my time.

This feature-stuffing is inevitable as Amazon starts charging to use Alexa on Echo devices ($19.99 a duration if you aren’t a Prime member) and competes alongside the AI giants in the agentic space. But nothing is additional frustrating than spending period explaining what you desire done, lone to afterward have to do it yourself.

When I tried ordering lunch through Uber Eats on the Echo Show, Alexa confidently told me, “Just inform me what you like, and I’ll discover it on the list as you speak.” That wasn’t the case. Instead, I spent 20 minutes trying to command a Chick-fil-A meal alongside iced tea, during the Uber Eats interface on the astute display insisted on ordering me a s’mores milkshake I never asked for. Booking an electrician was no better; following 10 minutes dictating my electric issues to Alexa and going through multiple Thumbtack sign-up screens, it gave me the electrician’s figure to call.

A bigger issue is memory. Alexa has the recollection of a goldfish. For a while, it forgot who I was and kept asking me to current myself whenever I asked it to do something. Which was frankly rude, since it’s been living in my home for a decade. It’s additionally expected to have a characteristic called Remember This that stores data you inform it, akin to the recollection features in ChatGPT or Claude.

I told it what academy my female went to, asked it to recall this, afterward asked what the traffic was akin getting there. It gave the accurate answer. But the next day, whenever I made the identical request, it confidently gave me the traffic conditions and journey period to an entirely distinct school, and it insisted that was the academy I’d asked it to remember.

Remembering particulars concerning you, your household, and your residence is a crucial accomplishment for a individual assistant. If I hired one that sent my female to the incorrect school, I’d blaze them immediately.

Amazon already knows a lot concerning my household, from what I buy to what’s on my buying catalog and equal what arrives at my forefront entrance — that’s a privacy tradeoff you have to grapple alongside whenever using Alexa. What it lacks is the individual environment a individual aide needs. This is anywhere Google and Apple have the lead, and anywhere Amazon has a lot of catching up to do to win here.

I test all the important astute residence assistants, including Google’s Gemini for Home and Siri in Apple Home, and Alexa is the most dependable and functional for controlling my home. But I’ll rotate to Siri to dispatch a content communication or Google to get me a traffic-free path to my daughter’s school.

With Alexa Plus, Amazon has taken a big stage toward the ambient astute home the business has imagined for complete a decade. What it needs to do now is evade the enticement to rotate into a general-purpose AI bot, and alternatively concentration on becoming the brain for your residence — possibly one you could merge alongside your individual AI aide of choice (something Google is doing alongside Google Home). This would necessitate Amazon to rediscover the openness that defined the phase whenever it launched in 2014 — it increasingly feels closed, alongside features that activity lone alongside Amazon’s brands and curated partners. But Alexa remains the biggest mainstream astute residence platform, alongside broad third-party support, a huge instal base, and broad assistance for protocols — including Matter and Thread.

Where it wins in breadth, however, Alexa lacks in depth. Alexa Plus have to be capable to authority all characteristic of all device, not fair on and off (Amazon lately launched a developer toolkit that could assistance here). Combined alongside its Omnisense fusion sensor platform, announced final year, this could bring it much nearer to completely learning and understanding your household’s patterns. With that context, it could propose proactive routines and commencement taking act for you — beyond random hunches all now and then. That’s the next frontier for the astute home, and today Amazon is finest poised to conquer it.

The astute residence aide I desire isn’t the one that can publish a eatery or compose an email; it’s the one that understands my home, can oversee it for me, and knows whenever I need a adorable baby pic to cheer me up.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge