After more than ten years, Alexa is finally getting a much-needed upgrade. Alexa+ promises to make Alexa much smarter, thanks to the power of AI. However, even with Alexa getting smarter, there are many issues with the original that a smarter version won’t fix.
9
Smarter Voice Is Still Voice
Even though the updated version of Alexa isn’t here yet, it’s already clear that talking to Alexa is going to be much more conversational than the current version. That’s no real surprise; AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini are already capable of holding natural turn-by-turn conversations which make talking to the OG Alexa feel seriously outdated.
The demonstrations of Alexa+ make it clear that Alexa is much smarter than before. However, a voice assistant that’s better at holding conversations is still a voice assistant. Voice control can be useful under the right circumstances, but a lot of the time it just feels awkward.
I set up my smart TV so that I could make it play or pause by asking Alexa, for example, but I always end up reaching for the remote. It feels more effort to speak out loud to Alexa than it does to press a button, and I don’t have to worry about Alexa not understanding me and starting to play music instead.
Star Trek: The Next Generation made me think that speaking to computers would end up as the dominant way of interacting with them, but the reality is that talking to devices often feels weird. No matter how much smarter Alexa gets, that awkwardness will still be there.
8
Alexa+ Answers Aren’t Necessarily More Helpful
The current version of Alexa can be helpful for simple requests. You can ask for the weather and get a local weather forecast. If you want anything more complicated, however, Alexa will usually start giving you an answer about something completely unrelated.
The demonstrations of the new version of Alexa indicate that you’ll be able to get much better answers to more complex questions. You also won’t have to keep saying “Alexa” every time you want to ask something more. However, the demos also showed something else that is likely to get annoying fast.
Alexa+ seems to have a tendency to give fairly lengthy answers. A long answer isn’t a huge issue if you’re reading it in an AI chatbot app on your phone. When it’s being spoken aloud, however, it can get annoying.
We’ve all got that one friend who takes ten minutes of uninterrupted speech to get across a simple point that should have taken a sentence or two at most. Alexa+ seems like it might turn out to be just like that friend. Even though you can interrupt Alexa+, doing so on a regular basis will get tiresome fast.
What’s worse is that the new Alexa appears to want to ask follow-up questions that you haven’t asked for. In promotional videos, Alexa asks if you want it to play the next season of a show after you finish the final episode or if you want it to play your chill mix when you wake up.
I don’t want my voice assistant to suggest things that I don’t want; it’s just another annoyance. If I wanted it to do something, I would have asked it to.
7
Alexa Routines Are Unlikely to Get Smarter
One of the features of Alexa+ that’s being promised is the ability to create routines with your voice. For example, you can ask Alexa to open the blinds, play your morning playlist, and turn on the coffee machine at the same time every weekday morning. It’s a much simpler way than creating them in the app.
However, Alexa routines are very limited in their scope. You’re restricted to routines in the format of “when X happens, do Y.” This is fine for simple automations, such as turning on the lights when the front door smart lock is unlocked. However, this format isn’t enough for many automations.
If you want the lights to turn on when you unlock the front door, but only if it’s dark, you can’t create a routine that can do this, even if you have a motion sensor that can detect light levels. Routines aren’t able to handle more complicated automations in the form “when X happens, if Y is true, do Z.” Alexa getting smarter will make it easier to create simple routines, but it won’t let you create even slightly more complex ones.
6
Many Features Only Work With Specific Brands
One of the major benefits of using Alexa as your smart home hub is that there are a huge number of Alexa-compatible devices available. You can connect smart home devices from most major brands to Alexa and control them using your voice.
However, not all smart home devices will work with Alexa. The Eve Outdoor Cam, for example, is a HomeKit-compatible camera that will work with Apple HomeKit but doesn’t support Alexa. Other devices require the use of hubs or dedicated Alexa skills to work.
The demonstrations of Alexa’s capabilities appear to indicate that this may be even more of an issue with Alexa+. For example, in one demonstration, Alexa was asked whether anyone had walked the dog that day. Alexa was able to scan the footage from the connected security cameras to see if the dog had been taken out or not.
This sounds like a useful feature, but it appeared to require the use of Ring cameras for it to work. Ring is, of course, owned by Amazon, so the tie-in makes sense. The trouble is that the feature may not work with other brands of cameras, meaning that you’re restricted to specific products, which aren’t necessarily the best options for your needs.
It’s always been a chore having to check whether smart home products are compatible with your smart home ecosystem of choice (and a big reason why I use Home Assistant which will work with most devices regardless of ecosystem). It seems like Alexa+ will only make this problem worse, limiting the products you can use if you want to take advantage of the full feature set.
5
Alexa+ Further Binds You to Amazon’s Ecosystem
Another demo showed Alexa identifying a song from the movie A Star is Born. Alexa was then asked to go to the part of the movie where the song features, and it was able to open the movie to the appropriate section on an Amazon Fire TV.
Again, this all seems very impressive. However, it took place on an Amazon Fire TV which was playing the movie on Amazon Prime Video. Do you see where this is going? If you ask Alexa to do the same with your LG TV when you’re watching Netflix, and you’re going to get nowhere fast.
The trouble is, Amazon doesn’t have a huge incentive to make these features available on other platforms. Just look at Netflix, which briefly made its streaming service play nicely with Apple TV, only to turn the useful feature off again because they’d rolled it out by mistake.
If you need an Amazon Fire TV and Prime Video to make an Alexa+ feature work, that’s a good thing for Amazon, even if it’s a bad thing for consumers.
4
You’ll Need to Share Huge Amounts of Information With Amazon
The current version of Alexa already knows a lot about you. Almost everything you say to the device (and potentially some things that you don’t) all gets sent to Amazon’s servers alongside the information that Amazon already knows about you and your home.
Alexa+ needs even more access and this is the part that scares me most. For many of the new features to work, you’re going to need to let Amazon have access to a lot of your data.
The presentation cited Alexa having access to your schedule, your smart home devices, your entertainment preferences, the people in your household, your emails, and the apps that you use, to name but a few. For the features to work, you need to grant Alexa access to most facets of your life, which is a huge privacy concern.
The example of asking if the dog has been walked requires giving Amazon access to all the footage from your security cameras. Just think about that for a minute. Not only can Alexa hear everything you do in your home, but it can see everything you do, too.
Amazon has already been letting employees listen to and annotate audio recordings captured by Alexa devices. There’s nothing to say that it wouldn’t do the same with video.
3
Alexa+ Is Limited to Screens (for Now)
Alexa+ still isn’t out yet, and when it is, it will initially only be available on the Echo Show 8, Echo Show 10, Echo Show 15, and Echo Show 21. This is incredibly annoying as someone who owns an Echo Show 5 and an Echo Hub, literally the only two Echo devices with screens that aren’t on the list.
That list also indicates that many of the features of Alexa+ will require the use of a screen. Amazon says that it will eventually be available on most Echo devices, but those cheap Echo Dots you have all over your home may not see the same boost in performance as the more expensive smart displays will see.
2
Not Everyone Gets the Same Features
Here’s something else that has always been an issue with Alexa and looks set to continue: despite selling Echo products around the globe, not everyone gets the same features. Early access to Alexa+ is only available in the US, and there’s no indication as to when it will come to other countries.
Even when it does launch, the experience is unlikely to be the same worldwide. There are plenty of useful Alexa features, such as the Alexa Guard feature that could detect the sound of smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, that simply never made it to other countries. That won’t stop Amazon from charging everyone the same, however.
1
A Lot of What Alexa Can Do Is Already Available
Amazon has taken a long time to get around to finally announcing the updated version of Alexa, and it still hasn’t been released yet. In the meantime, people are used to using AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini on their phones or computers.
Much of what Alexa+ is being promoted to do (including the ability to hold natural conversations, change tack in the middle of a conversation, or the ability to interrupt a response), are things that people have already been doing for some time with other apps.
If you’re paying a subscription fee for an AI chatbot such as Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, you have very little incentive to use an updated version of Alexa that does a lot of the same things, especially when you have to pay for the privilege. Indeed, many of the new Alexa’s capabilities are powered by Anthropic’s AI models rather than Amazon’s own.
Apple was late to the party with AI and is still playing catch-up. Amazon has turned up even later and doesn’t seem to be offering a lot more. Some features seem useful, such as the ability to get Alexa to make a restaurant reservation for you. However, the feature isn’t live yet, and other competitors such as ChatGPT already have similar features available for some users.
Alexa arrived with a huge amount of promise, but it hasn’t improved in years. Amazon is finally giving Alexa a major update, but making Alexa smarter won’t solve all of its problems. It doesn’t fix the fundamental issues such as ecosystem lock-in, serious privacy concerns, and that awkward feeling of talking to a speaker.
