Hands-on with Alexa Plus in the smart home

Oh, Alexa, how you’ve changed. The long-awaited new Alexa, Alexa Plus, is set to bring a more conversational, context-aware, and capable assistant to your smart home. With a new voice (eight of them, in fact) and a new attitude, this is the biggest change to the voice assistant since it debuted in 2014. And it all sounds very impressive.

Announced at a press conference in New York City this week, Alexa Plus offers several new generative AI-powered abilities to help you manage your life, plus some major smart home upgrades. I was at the event and saw several staged demos of the new features but also got to try out some of the smart home improvements for myself.

The biggest change is how Alexa can respond to natural language; the demo showed that you can talk to it and say what you want rather than having to remember specific commands. I saw the new Alexa understand and execute commands such as, “Bring the lights up in here and set to a warm glow.” The GE Cync smart bulbs and light strips in the room responded, despite the request not including a room or specific names for each device.

Then, when instructed to “Turn on the lamp in the sitting area,” Alexa was apparently able to “reason” that meant the lamp named “Sofa lamp.” This should mean no more memorizing specific device names, making it easier for anyone in the home to control devices with their voice.

I was also able to talk to the assistant myself and try out its new ability to follow multiple commands at once without needing to repeat the wake word, Alexa. I asked it to dim the lights and “make it a little warmer.” The thermostat adjusted while the lights dimmed. Alexa said, “I dimmed the lights in the living room and increased the temperature by two degrees; is there anything else you need?” I then said, “Can you vacuum the floor?” It replied, “Okay,” and the Roomba started a job.

Another new feature I tried was the ability to set up a smart home routine just by using voice. I told Alexa I’d been having trouble waking up recently, and after some back-and-forth, it created a “Good Morning” routine that set an alarm to wake me up to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” and adjust the smart lights in my room.

That’s a fairly simple one because there weren’t a lot of devices connected to the Show. But Amazon says that, courtesy of its knowledge of hundreds of smart home APIs, Alexa is capable of creating more complex routines through voice. This should make it easier for people to do more with their connected devices and not have to spend time programming an app.

The other exciting upgrade is the new Echo Show UI. This is launching on the 15 and 21, but Scott Durham of Amazon told me it will come to the Show 8 and 10 at some point. With a cleaner, sleeker full-screen UI with larger widgets to take advantage of the screen size (I saw it demoed on the 21-inch screen), it’s now more customizable and feels more like a tablet interface than a smart display. During the demo, it appeared to move smoothly and quickly with limited lag.

The UI now has a much larger calendar and smart home widgets. A handy new feature is the ability to send images, documents, and notes to your alexa@alexa.com email address or through the Alexa app or new web interface. From there, Amazon says it can parse things like events and add them to your calendar, as well as let you ask questions about the information. Apparently, it can even decipher all the info in that lengthy school email and set reminders to tell you what you need to send in on which days.

The smart home control UI has been lifted from the excellent interface on the Echo Hub, giving you easy touch control of devices in your home when you don’t want to use voice or a smartphone. And when you take it full screen, it’s now much easier to switch between rooms and devices. Alexa’s Map View is here, too, and it looks great on the big screen.

A new Ring camera integration feature lets Alexa Plus query Ring’s Smart Video Search to show you summaries of events that happened around your house or pull specific instances like, “Did a package arrive?” or “Did someone let the dog out?”

Another big improvement coming with Alexa Plus is new cooking controls. Currently, following recipes on an Echo Show can be fiddly and frustrating; with Alexa Plus, the assistant gets more proactive. It can now take ingredients from recipes and add them to a shopping list, let you use natural language to add additional items, and arrange to have them delivered to you (with Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh as well as “several other grocery providers.”)

Alexa can also come up with recipes based on ingredients you tell it you have on hand and suggest substitutions for items you’re out of. The kitchen is one of the most useful places for hands-free voice control, and if this works well, I can see it being very helpful. I’m most excited about the new timer feature, which takes all the time-based steps in the recipe — such as whisk for two minutes or bake at 350 degrees for 35 minutes — and automatically sets them for you to kick off when you’re ready.

Aaron Rubenson of Amazon told me that thanks to Alexa’s improved natural language skills, it interfaces better with smart kitchen appliances. So, instead of having to use specific nomenclature to get it to preheat my Thermador oven, it should respond to any command that implies I want my oven on. For example, “Alexa, can you set the oven to the right temperature for this recipe?”

I’ve used Alexa for close to a decade now, and while it has its uses, it’s never felt indispensable. This is largely because of how tricky it is to talk to correctly. I’ve had to learn Alexa-speak to get it to do anything reliably, often making it more frustrating than useful. If the new Alexa can work as well in my home as it did in the demos I saw this week, this will be a major shift in home automation.