Alexa+ Disappoints: What’s Really Wrong?
▼ Summary
– The author initially had high hopes for the Amazon Echo Show 15 with Alexa+ as a hands-free entertainment device for their kitchen.
– After extensive use, they found Alexa+ to be unreliable and frustrating, comparing its performance to an unpredictable toddler.
– Alexa+ is Amazon’s 2025 generative AI-powered voice assistant, available to US Prime subscribers, designed for better understanding and natural conversation.
– In practice, the assistant often failed to play requested music or videos correctly, requiring overly specific phrasing to work occasionally.
– The device’s core failure was not automating complex tasks as marketed, but simply providing reliable, hands-free entertainment, which it did not achieve.
Mounting Amazon’s new Echo Show 15 on the kitchen wall initially sparked excitement for its potential as a seamless, hands-free entertainment hub. The promise of shifting music and YouTube videos from a phone to a large, wall-mounted display, controlled by the upgraded Alexa+ AI voice assistant, seemed like the perfect upgrade for any home chef. However, after extensive daily use, the reality has been a frustrating exercise in unreliability, where the device often feels more like a hindrance than a helpful companion.
Amazon’s reworked voice assistant, launched in 2025, integrates generative AI at its core and is now available to all U.S. Prime subscribers. While designed to understand nuanced requests and engage in natural conversation, the experience frequently falls short. In practice, it feels less like a fluid dialogue and more like negotiating with a stubborn entity that requires exact, magical phrasing to function. This lack of intuitive reliability turns simple tasks into drawn-out ordeals, often ending with a resigned walk to the touchscreen to manually complete what the voice command failed to achieve.
The core issue lies in the gap between marketing and performance. Alexa+ is promoted as a service for automating complex life tasks, yet it struggles with fundamental entertainment commands. A common household joke now involves guessing which artist will actually play when a song is requested. Asking for Charli XCX might yield a track by Sombr, while a request for The Black Keys could bring up Alabama Shakes. When it doesn’t play a loosely related artist, the assistant often defaults to displaying a YouTube search results page, forcing manual selection.
Success requires painfully precise language. A verbose command like “Play the song ‘Best Guess’ by artist Lucy Dacus on YouTube” might work, but this contradicts the promised conversational intelligence. Simpler, more natural prompts consistently fail. Saying “Play a song by Lucy Dacus” triggers a literal YouTube search of that phrase, while “I want to hear a Lucy Dacus song” can cause the system to glitch and return to the home screen entirely.
The problems extend beyond music to video content. Attempting to watch a teaser for an upcoming show like RuPaul’s Drag Race highlights the assistant’s limitations. An initial request to “Play the teaser for the upcoming Drag Race episode” was met with a message that the action wasn’t supported, followed by a search for “related content.” Only after several attempts with rephrased commands did the correct clip finally play. This inconsistency undermines the very concept of a hands-free, intelligent assistant, making the Echo Show 15 feel like a promising idea hampered by unreliable execution. For a device meant to simplify life, it currently adds an unexpected layer of complication.
(Source: Wired)
