I owned a lot of Alexa-powered devices in my former home: There were Amazon Echos in most rooms, including an older Echo Plus in the living room, a smattering of Dots, a Spot in a bedroom, and an Echo Show in the kitchen. A Fire TV ran in the bedroom. And, in a drawer, a rarely used Fire HD tablet sat collecting dust.
With the total loss of the home due to a March 2024 house fire, there also came a new opportunity: We could now make a fresh start to create a more modernized smart home after rebuilding our house. But whether Alexa still deserves to be the center of our connected home remains to be seen.
To find out whether Alexa is still the best smart assistant for my family, I’m going to test Amazon’s AI-powered devices, experiment with AI queries, and write out my thoughts in a multi-part series. With this series, I hope to offer consumers insights as to how well Alexa works in various real-world situations, not company demos.
Alexa needed to catch up
Image Credits:Amazon
Amazon’s assistant, which once gave its users Star Trek vibes as they ordered their home computer to close the blinds or turn off the lights or order milk, no longer seems as revolutionary in the ChatGPT era. Today, people can engage with AI via text and voice chat. Modern AI chatbots and AI-powered services can answer so many more questions, are imaginative, can reason, can create images and art, and generate videos, and with the agentic AI, they can even perform online tasks on your behalf.
In February 2025, Amazon announced a complete makeover of its digital voice assistant with the arrival of Alexa+, powered by generative AI. That service began rolling out slowly to customers in March and is now available to “many millions” of users, Amazon says. The system is also model-agnostic, meaning Alexa+ can use whatever she needs in the moment to answer the question or complete the task. Alexa+ is using models from Anthropic and Amazon Nova, among others.
The company teased that this improved Alexa could do more than set timers and alarms, control smart home devices, and answer questions. She leverages generative AI to make sense of information stored in Amazon users’ accounts, understand their schedules, and their preferences. She can remember things, process files, and summarize a Ring camera’s footage.
Image Credits:Amazon
Notably, Amazon says it’s been working with partners to allow it to take actions for people, like booking dinner reservations or Uber rides, or buying concert tickets. Integrations with Amazon’s own grocery service could also have it make shopping lists by speaking to it, and then have those products delivered. Essentially, it’s aiming to bring agentic AI into the home.
But before we can get to that, let’s see how Alexa+ handles the basics.
In the first part of this series, I’m going to set up Alexa+, use the app, and ask the assistant some questions that only the new Alexa+ can do. Later, I’ll test the agentic AI features and smart home integrations.
Setting up Alexa+ on an Echo Spot
Device: Echo SpotDefault music service: Spotify (Premium)
Before moving to my new home, I put Alexa+ to the test on a brand-new Echo Spot after being accepted into the beta. Since I couldn’t yet hook …