Alexa Plus improves smart home control but falls short as a personal assistant

The Verge reviewer Jennifer Pattison Tuohy says Amazon’s Alexa Plus has become more useful for managing a smart home after a year of testing, but remains frustrating as a personal assistant. She has tested it at home since July 2025, ahead of its full launch in February 2026.

Tuohy reports that Alexa Plus handles routines, general questions, calendar tasks, shopping and multistep voice commands more reliably than the earlier Alexa. She says conversational requests such as “make it brighter in here” work well, and that weather questions, general knowledge queries and timer commands now take three to five seconds. When an initial request goes wrong, a follow-up usually corrects it.

In the kitchen, Alexa Plus can work through a recipe with the user, answer related questions and remember the cooking context. Tuohy says it is the best voice-assistant cooking experience she has tested, though it can still lose track of a recipe.

The review also describes shortcomings. Attempts to make Alexa Plus a broader personal assistant are “underbaked and frustrating,” Tuohy writes, and ads on Echo Show displays disrupt the experience. She also says Alexa sometimes fails to recognize her. The review’s overall assessment is that Alexa Plus is currently strongest at smart home tasks, while its personal-assistant features and display ads remain significant frustrations.