If you have followed Amazon's smart home ambitions over the past year, you might be wondering whether Alexa+ is the refresh the company's aging voice assistant desperately needed, or just another unfinished product pushed out to meet investor expectations. After spending a month with the Echo Show 15 and Alexa+, the answer appears to be: both.
Amazon's redesigned Alexa is genuinely smarter than its predecessor. The new version understands natural language in ways the old Alexa simply could not. You can say something like "the light over the sink is too dim" rather than barking "kitchen light to 50 percent," and it gets what you mean. It handles conversation threads better, recalls context across multiple questions, and even admits when it does not know something. These improvements are real and worth noting.
But real improvement and ready-for-market product are not the same thing.Many requests took "up to 15 seconds for a response," with even checking the weather taking over ten seconds. In a kitchen, where these devices are typically used, fifteen seconds waiting for a response to a simple command feels like an eternity. Reach for your phone. You already have the answer.
The smart home control problems are worse.One journalist could not get Alexa to properly control her bathroom fan, encountered problems with the assistant getting confused following simple recipes and trying to "gaslight" her when she asked for clarity, and reported the device told her that it "can't actually make coffee," despite being connected to a smart Bosch coffee maker. These are not edge cases. They are core functionality that Alexa is supposed to handle reliably.
Internal documents show that many of the new Alexa+ features won't be available immediately, and not all of the features Amazon showcased at a launch event are ready. This pattern has defined Amazon's approach to AI products: announce big, ship incomplete, and promise improvement later.
To be fair, other testers have found aspects worth praising.Consumer Reports noted that Alexa+ improved smart home controls and conversation abilities, with the assistant no longer requiring robotic precision in voice commands—you can say "turn on the light over the sink" rather than "turn on the kitchen sink light," and it understands the context. Some journalists reported that Alexa+ functioned well enough to genuinely improve household routines once properly configured.
The device's hardware—the Echo Show 15 itself—shares blame for these shortcomings.The hardware is "underpowered," with Alexa+ feeling like a "surface-level integration" into the smart home, and the assistant "desperately" needs better hardware. Amazon has taken this criticism seriously; the company has announced new Echo devices with more powerful processors designed specifically for Alexa+.
The honest assessment here requires acknowledging genuine tension. Amazon invested heavily in developing Alexa+ because the original Alexa had stalled as a product category. Investors demanded progress. The company had to ship something. What it shipped is not terrible—it is not good either. It is a work in progress that you can pay money to beta test.
There is a reasonable argument that Alexa+ in its current form should have remained in testing longer. There is also an argument that consumer criticism will drive necessary improvement faster than a private beta ever could. Reasonable people can disagree on which approach serves customers better. What is not debatable is that Amazon released a product knowing it had serious flaws, and consumers deserve to understand that trade-off before buying in.