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 make me cry. Since my son left for college, the Echo Show in my office has been making then-and-now photo montages: the toddler with his first 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 more than once. But then comes the ad, a full-screen photo of a hideous brown leather recliner. I go from nostalgic joy to irritation in an instant.

That pretty much sums up my year with Alexa Plus. One minute it will do something seriously impressive; the next, it acts like it doesn't know who I am.

I've been testing Amazon's AI-powered Alexa Plus assistant in my home since July 2025, shortly after it launched in early access and ahead of its full launch in February 2026. With Google's rollout of Gemini for Home earlier this year, and rumors that Apple is finally bringing the full Apple Intelligence experience to Apple Home this month, now felt like a good moment to review Amazon's progress.

A year in, Alexa Plus is the best smart home assistant I've tested: It's easy to talk to, handles routines and multistep commands, and helps in the kitchen. But Amazon's attempts to stretch it into a personal assistant are underbaked and frustrating, and the ads on the Echo Show smart displays are out of control.

Alexa is more reliable in my smart home

I tested Alexa Plus with an Echo Show 11 in my kitchen, Pops and Dots around my house, and a Show 15 and 8 in my office. I use voice commands to control my smart home devices, help me with timers and recipes, add events to my calendar and groceries to my shopping list, and occasionally order something from Amazon. I use the screen-based devices as photo frames, for viewing camera feeds, and as touchscreen controllers for my smart home.

A lot has improved. Smart home control, routines, general queries, calendar management, and shopping are light-years ahead of pre-AI Alexa, mostly because the new Alexa understands me better. The big promise of LLM-powered voice assistants was the ability to say what you want without using stilted, precise nomenclature. In my testing, that's proven out. My family uses Alexa more now than they used to, and I like being able to give more general instructions, like “Alexa, make it brighter in here†and “Alexa, I'm cold,†and it knows what to do.

It's also now faster and more reliable. When I started testing the new assistant, I ran into a litany of issues, from misunderstood commands to messed-up routines and very slow responses. Today, questions about the weather or general knowledge and commands like setting a timer execute in three to five seconds, a big change from the 10 to 15 seconds I saw in 2025. When it gets a request wrong the first time, a follow-up now usually fixes it. I can say “Lock the front door, turn off the lights, turn down the thermostat, and tell the robot to clean downstairs,†and it happens promptly, without any back talk.

Alexa is also much better at answering questions, especially in the kitchen. Talking with it is easier now that you can speak conversationally and don't have to repeat the wake word — but I had to switch to the new Brief personality mode after one too many superlatives about my shopping list ( “Oooh, that will make for one spicy salsa!).

I recently snapped a picture of my friend's Dutch baby recipe while in England and sent it to Alexa via the app. When I got home, I asked Alexa to help me cook it; the assistant pulled up the reformatted recipe, and we chatted back and forth easily while I cooked. I could ask, “What temperature should I preheat the oven?†and “How many ounces are 160 grams?†and it would remember we were discussing the recipe and give the right answer. Alexa still sometimes forgets what it's doing, and getting back to the recipe can be tricky, but it's the best voice-assistant cooking experience I've tested.

I've also found Alexa more useful for general knowledge, something it used to be terrible at, and calendar management has become more 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 entire school schedule that way. Shopping is also hugely improved. I uploaded 10 screenshots of sewing supplies from my daughter's teacher to the Alexa app, and it found all the items and added them to my Amazon cart, saving me a lot of time.

My favorite upgrade is creating Alexa smart home routines by voice. I think of something I want my home to do, tell Alexa, and it does it. I wanted the string lights on the porch to turn on when I walk outside; Alexa set up a routine using the motion sensor on the Ring camera. I can also adapt routines on the fly. One night, my daughter came out of her bathroom complaining, “The lights kept shutting off.†I told Alexa to change the “Hallway bathroom light†routine to shut off after 30 minutes instead of 15, and it fixed it.

But it took a long time to get here. Like many Alexa users, I had a lot of technical debt in my smart home, and as a reviewer, my Alexa app was a graveyard of zombie devices. To get Alexa Plus to work properly for me, I had to rebuild my smart home from scratch, deleting all my old Alexa skills and routines and killing dead and duplicate devices. It took months, literally. I've had to re-add 55 Hue devices six times over the past year. And while Alexa has improved, the Alexa app has not. Adding, deleting, and moving multiple devices is still deeply painful, and the app experience is Alexa's biggest flaw.

What I really want is Alexa Plus to manage all that for me so I never have to touch the app. From setting up gadgets to troubleshooting issues, Alexa should be able to put devices in the right room and, if something isn't working, figure it out. I want it to manage my smart home for me. That is an assistant I would pay money for.

Agents, accuracy, and ads

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

Display ads are out of control. Every Show device is now a rotating billboard in my home for Amazon goods. Even if you turn off all the homescreen content (the rotating screen on the displays), you still get ads interspersed between your photos and the clock. Timing is random; I can see one an hour on the Echo Show 5 in the bedroom and then go a whole day without seeing one on the 11 in my kitchen, but they're fairly constant 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 show up with something useful at just the right moment,†he said. But it hasn't felt curated to me; among the beauty products, car accessories, snacks, furniture, health supplements, and smart home gear that have assaulted my eyeballs, nothing has been something I wanted to buy. Even worse, Amazon recently added video ads.

There is now a fix, but it will cost you: Amazon's new Photo Gallery Unlimited feature removes the ads from the homescreen for $2.99 per month per device. If you don't want to pay monthly to avoid ads, I would stick with the Echo speakers.

Alexa Plus is still inconsistent at executing more complicated requests. This was a big issue in my initial testing and has improved, but not gone away. The shift from the reliable 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 guess at what you want.

For example, Alexa still can't reliably make a cup of coffee. I have an Alexa-capable Bosch 800 Series coffee machine with a special integration that gives Alexa more granular controls, including making a specific drink, such as a coffee grande. This works most of the time — a big improvement over my initial testing. But the other day I asked Alexa to make me a coffee grande, and it replied, “I'd love to, but I'm fresh out of arms and a coffee maker.†I asked again, and it said, “Sure, here's a coffee grinder,†displaying an AI-generated image of a coffee grinder.

Alexa Plus still struggles with timely information. Asking it when England next played in the soccer World Cup in June almost made me miss kickoff, and last month when I asked what channel an Ohio State–Illinois football game was on, it offered to set up a reminder for a game that had already started.

Getting dates and times wrong is not a trait I want in a personal assistant, which is what Amazon is pushing Alexa Plus as. Instead of a stoic, disembodied voice, I'm now greeted every morning by a perky pair of digital hands proffering a cheery emoji and a line like “Hey Jen, tell me what I can do for you today?†on the Echo Show in my kitchen.

Perkiness aside — I'm English; we don't do perky — I'm not against Alexa doing more for me. It's just that the assistant has failed to finish several tasks I've given it. Most of these new agentic features, including integrations with Thumbtack, OpenTable, and Ticketmaster, feel underbaked and mostly a waste of my time.

This feature-stuffing is inevitable as Amazon starts charging to use Alexa on Echo devices ($19.99 a month if you aren't a Prime member) and competes with the AI giants in the agentic space. But nothing is more frustrating than spending time explaining what you want done, only to then have to do it yourself.

When I tried ordering lunch through Uber Eats on the Echo Show, Alexa confidently told me, “Just tell me what you like, and I'll find it on the menu as you speak.†That wasn't the case. Instead, I spent 20 minutes trying to order a Chick-fil-A meal with iced tea, while the Uber Eats interface on the smart display insisted on ordering me a s'mores milkshake I never asked for. Booking an electrician was no better; after 10 minutes dictating my electrical issues to Alexa and going through several Thumbtack sign-up screens, it gave me the electrician's number to call.

A bigger problem is memory. Alexa has the memory of a goldfish. For a while, it forgot who I was and kept asking me to introduce myself whenever I asked it to do something. Which was frankly rude, since it's been living in my house for a decade. It's also supposed to have a feature called Remember This that stores information you tell it, similar to the memory features in ChatGPT or Claude.

I told it what school my daughter went to, asked it to remember this, then asked what the traffic was like getting there. It gave the correct answer. But the next day, when I made the same request, it confidently gave me the traffic conditions and travel time to an entirely different school, and it insisted that was the school I'd asked it to remember.

Remembering details about you, your household, and your home is a crucial skill for a personal assistant. If I hired one that sent my daughter to the wrong school, I'd fire them immediately.

Amazon already knows a lot about my household, from what I buy to what's on my shopping list and even what arrives at my front door — that's a privacy tradeoff you have to grapple with when using Alexa. What it lacks is the personal context a personal assistant needs. This is where Google and Apple have the lead, and where Amazon has a lot of catching up to do to succeed here.

I test all the major smart home assistants, including Google's Gemini for Home and Siri in Apple Home, and Alexa is the most reliable and functional for controlling my home. But I'll turn to Siri to send a text message or Google to get me a traffic-free route to my daughter's school.

With Alexa Plus, Amazon has taken a big step toward the ambient smart home the company has imagined for over a decade. What it needs to do now is avoid the temptation to become a general-purpose AI bot, and instead focus on becoming the brain for your home — potentially one you could integrate with your personal AI assistant of choice (something Google is doing with Google Home). This would require Amazon to rediscover the openness that defined the platform when it launched in 2014 — it increasingly feels closed, with features that work only with Amazon's brands and curated partners. But Alexa remains the biggest mainstream smart home platform, with broad third-party support, a huge install base, and wide support for protocols — including Matter and Thread.

Where it wins in breadth, however, Alexa lacks in depth. Alexa Plus should be able to control every feature of every device, not just on and off (Amazon recently launched a developer toolkit that could help here). Combined with its Omnisense fusion sensor platform, announced last year, this could bring it much closer to fully learning and understanding your household's patterns. With that context, it could suggest proactive routines and start taking action for you — beyond random hunches every now and then. That's the next frontier for the smart home, and today Amazon is best poised to overcome it.

The smart home assistant I want isn't the one that can book a restaurant or write an email; it's the one that understands my home, can manage it for me, and knows when I need a cute baby pic to cheer me up.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge