Why Is Alexa+ So Bad?

When I firstmounted Amazon's newEcho Show 15on my kitchen wall, I was enthusiastic about its potential as a hands-free entertainment device.

I enjoy listening to music or playingYouTubevideos in the background as I’m cooking dinner.

So moving that from my phone and onto the wall, with Amazon’supgraded Alexa+AI voice assistant that I can prompt hands-free, sounded like a winning combo.

But now, after more than amonth with Alexa+on this 15-inch screen, I’ve concluded that Alexa+ simply doesn’t work well and lacks the basic reliability I need from asmart homedevice.

Yes, it’s still in early access, but it maneuvers like an unpredictable toddler smashing around and half-completing tasks.

Alexa+ is designed to be better at understanding your requests, more personally tuned, and capable of more natural conversational interactions rather than rigid commands.

To me, it felt like interacting with a synthetic bridge troll haranguing me until I said the magic combination of words.

TheAI assistantcan be so persnickety that I let out an exasperated sigh at least once during every interaction in my kitchen as I trudged over to the remote or touchscreen in resignation to finish something Alexa+ struggled to accomplish.

Amazon markets Alexa+ as a service that can help automate multiple tasks in your life, like ordering groceries and booking an Uber.

I’m not here toorder a ride from my voice assistant; I just want some entertaining distractions as I scrub the dishes.

It has become a running gag in my household trying to guess what musician Alexa+ will play on YouTube when requesting a song.

A request for some Charli XCX was answered with Sombr’s “Back to Friends.” Instead of The Black Keys, I got Alabama Shakes.

When it’s not playing a similar artist, Alexa+ sometimes searches a phrase on YouTube and leaves me to choose a video from the results.

If I meticulously phrase my requests in highly specific ways, then I could occasionally get what I wanted.

For example, “Play the song ‘Best Guess’ by artist Lucy Dacus on YouTube” worked as a wordy but successful prompt.

But wasn’t the pitch of generative AI that it’s better at knowing my underlying intent?

That it should be more of a conversational experience?

Less meticulous prompts to Alexa+ didn’t go as smoothly as the wordy examples.

“Play a song by Lucy Dacus” just gave me the YouTube search, “Play a song by Lucy Dacus” verbatim.

Bots will be bots.

Trying again, I put in another request: “I want to hear a Lucy Dacus song.” This led to a glitch where Alexa+ failed to search for anything and dropped me back to the home screen.

How about some videos?

Even though the new seasons of RuPaul’sDrag Raceare not as good, I still enjoy watching with friends at the bar on Friday nights.

A teaser is always posted on YouTube before the full episode airs.

So, I said, “Play the teaser for the upcomingDrag Raceepisode.” This first attempt was also a bust.

Alexa+ claimed this wasn’t a supported action, and it searched for “related content” instead.

I tried a few times, switching up the phrasing to finally get through to the clip.

Maybe switching video apps would get me better results, so I tried HBO Max.

On my home screen, Alexa+ showed me a thumbnail forThe Pittas a TV series I should check out next.

Sure, why not?

Seems likeeveryone else is watching that show, so I’m curious.

After asking multiple times, the most Alexa+ could do via voice control was open the HBO Max “Who’s Watching” page.

After it failed at this, I followed up by asking, “Alexa, did you play an episode ofThe Pitt?”The AI assistant claimed multiple times that it was actually playing an episode when it was in fact not.

Alexa+ said I wasn’t seeing the show because it was paused.

When I asked the bot to resume the supposed episode it was playing, it replayed some nature sounds I had on earlier in the day.

I considered maybe this was just beyond what Alexa+ was meant to do.

I asked the bot if it could play videos on my logged-in HBO Max account.

It enthusiastically responded that itdefinitelycould do that for me, then just opened the same “Who’s Watching” page again and stopped.

That was the last straw.

We’re no longer on speaking terms.

Other developers building automation tools, like Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI, have released improved software over the past few months that is noticeably better at navigating apps and websites on behalf of users.None oftheseare perfect, but Amazon is lagging with Alexa+.

This is not a service I would pay for, and I was also left wishing I could pay to install a different company’s voice assistant into the Echo Show 15.

Alas, I guess the mounted screen is just going to have to come down from my kitchen wall.