Alexa Plus one year on: great smart home control, weak personal assistant
The Verge's Jennifer Pattison Tuohy spent a year living with Amazon's AI-powered Alexa Plus, from early access in July 2025 through its full launch in February 2026. She calls it the best smart home assistant she has tested — responses dropped from 10–15 seconds to 3–5 seconds, and routines, calendar import, shopping and recipe help all improved — but says its personal-assistant features are still underbaked and it fumbles complex or time-sensitive requests. Her biggest complaint is the constant advertising on Echo Show displays, which Amazon says it will remove only through Photo Gallery Unlimited at $2.99 per month per device.
A rare year-long field test showing that LLM-powered voice assistants are now dependable for smart home control, while reliability, timely information and ads remain the main barriers to wider personal-assistant use.