Alexa+ Is the Upgrade Amazon’s Assistant Desperately Needed, but Its App Is Still a Mess

The original Alexa voice is iconic, but Amazon is using Alexa+ as a chance to give its voice an upgrade. There are now eight options. The original voice is still available, but it now sounds more natural and less robotic. I initially chose a more peppy voice, but my wife wasn’t a fan, so I changed it back to the original.

While the Alexa+ update applies to all Amazon Echo devices in your home, I primarily interact with Alexa+ on my first-generation Amazon Echo Show 15. It has managed to survive in my home up until now thanks to its built-in Fire TV software, which makes it a really good kitchen TV. But outside of that software, its user interface has always felt like an afterthought.

Thankfully, Alexa+ includes a completely new user interface for Echo Show devices that feels more responsive and feature-rich, even on my 4-year-old device, which is underpowered compared with newer Echo Shows. There are now detailed widgets for calendars, to-do lists, shopping lists, music and video controls, and smart home controls.

While the new software is nice, it hasn’t stopped Amazon from using your Echo Show as a billboard for ads. They still take over the whole screen and remain as irrelevant as ever. And it feels like a cheap move by Amazon now that Alexa+ is becoming a paid service.

Alexa+ is a great general knowledge resource, on a par with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini. I had lengthy conversations with it about everything from how much protein powder to use in my post-workout shakes to the freezing point of compressed carbon dioxide. (I was worried about my shipment of SodaStream canisters sitting out in the cold!) But just like when you use those chatbots, you don’t know if the information Alexa+ is telling you is accurate. There were a few cases where I caught it being flat wrong, like when it misstated the day a snowstorm was forecast to hit my area, so take what it says with a grain of salt.

Alexa+ can now perform tasks that you would expect a real assistant to do. I am particularly impressed by its calendar abilities. I asked it to add a recurring event to my Google calendar for the first and third Tuesdays of every month, and it did so without missing a beat. The assistant can also remember information for you and use it in the future, such as your preferred nickname or details about an upcoming trip.

Alexa+ also offers additional agentic abilities, such as making restaurant reservations for you. It does this through partner services in the new Alexa+ Store within the Alexa app. It currently supports Fodor’s, OpenTable, Thumbtack, Ticketmaster, Uber, and Amazon’s paid Alexa Emergency Assist service. The store lists many more services, such as Fandango and Grubhub, that are supposedly coming soon.

I tried the OpenTable and Uber integrations. Alexa+ had no problem helping me find a local Italian restaurant and booking a reservation, but when I tried to order an Uber ride, it got both my home address and the destination address wrong. I then wondered if I had input my home address incorrectly, but Alexa+ confirmed the correct address when I asked. It seems there may still be some bugs to iron out on the agentic side of Alexa+.

Frankly, the old Alexa was terrible at understanding my 5-year-old son. It would regularly get tripped up by his “ums,” “uhs,” pauses, and repeated words. And it would often provide underwhelming answers to his (admittedly random) questions, if it could answer them at all. “Hmm, I’m not sure how to help you with that . . .” was a common response from the old Alexa that would leave him frustrated.

Alexa+ solves all of these problems. It’s never confused by his filler words or stuttering, and it understands his requests almost every time. But best of all, it provides long, detailed answers to his questions, complete with pictures and videos. How are airplanes made? I have no idea, but Alexa+ does.

Perhaps my favorite update of all is the assistant’s new smart home abilities. Since Alexa+ is better at understanding speech and meaning, you no longer need to use precise, almost-robotic voice commands to control devices in your home. Instead of saying “turn on the kitchen sink light,” I can say “turn on the light over the sink” and it knows exactly which light I’m talking about. If I say “it’s really damp in the bathroom,” it turns on the bathroom exhaust fan. It understands the context of your speech in a way the old Alexa never did.

This new level of understanding also applies to Alexa Routines, which you can create to automate multiple devices based on a voice command or when something happens in your home. Before Alexa+, you had to manually program routines in the Alexa app using “If, Then” statements and lots of checkboxes. It was tedious. But now you can tell Alexa+ what you want the routine to do and it will create it for you. For example, I asked it to turn on my backyard lights if my floodlight camera detects motion in the middle of the night. Without a hiccup, it created a routine that does exactly that every day between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.

And in a small victory over the old Alexa, with the new version, you can control multiple devices using a single voice command. If you didn’t know, you used to have to say commands one at a time. “Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights. Alexa, set the thermostat to 72 degrees. Alexa, open the blinds.” Now you can issue all of those commands at once without having to wait between commands or repeat Alexa’s name.

As impressive as these improvements are, Alexa+ still has some bugs. For example, when I first set up Alexa+, it didn’t understand that I have a motorized curtain in my kitchen that it could open and close, even though I added it to the Alexa app. Then, weeks later, it suddenly recognized that the curtain exists and now controls it with simple commands, such as “open the kitchen curtain.” But that’s something the much dumber Siri was—and is still—able to do flawlessly.

When Amazon first announced Alexa+ back in February, the company said it would also release a new version of the Alexa app and a brand-new web portal at Alexa.com. The website quietly became available in late 2025. It resembles other AI chatbot sites, such as ChatGPT and Gemini, but it incorporates some notable Alexa-specific features, including smart home controls, calendars, and lists.

While the new website is nice, the Alexa app desperately needs an overhaul. The smart home controls are buggy, and the user interface is clunky and slow compared with smart home apps from Amazon’s rivals—Apple Home, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings. About two years ago, I stopped heavily using Alexa to control my smart home because of these issues, and it’s disappointing to see that Amazon still hasn’t fixed them.

That said, the app has one new, noteworthy Alexa+ feature, the ability to upload images and documents to use in the future. When I first started using Alexa+, this feature didn’t work at all, but it now seems to be up and running. To test it out, I uploaded a photo of my mom’s apple pie recipe, taken from a very old cookbook she owns. Alexa+ had no problem recalling the recipe with the exact ingredients and measurements—at least at first. When I asked for the same recipe two weeks later, it had no idea what I was talking about. (With some extra prompting from me, Alexa+ was finally able to find it.)

I have a renewed appreciation for Alexa, thanks to its AI overhaul. It’s far more capable than its predecessor. In fact, I liked it so much that I cleaned up my smart home setup in the Alexa app and have started talking to my Echo smart speakers much more frequently than I did before.

Alexa+ has also breathed new life into my Echo Show. While my wife still mainly uses it as a TV, I love having a smart home command center right in my kitchen. The controls are responsive and satisfying to use, and I love being able to review my Ring camera recordings without taking out my phone. I hope that Amazon will bring these slick new controls to the Alexa app sooner rather than later.

While I’ve hit pause on migrating my smart home away from Alexa, the competition will be heating up in 2026. I just received access to Google’s Alexa+ competitor, Gemini for Home, so expect to see my thoughts on that assistant soon. And rumor has it that Apple will be releasing its AI-overhauled version of Siri, along with Apple’s own take on a smart home display, sometime this spring.