When Amazon’s digital assistant turned 10 at the end of last year, I wrote an op-ed that said, “It’s hard not to feel that Alexa has hit a bit of a plateau.”
And now, after a decade of quietly running the show in millions of homes, seamlessly handling everything from turning on the lights to setting timers for boiling eggs, Amazon seems to have admitted that too, which is why Alexa+ has been unleashed.
Amazon has bigger problems though beyond saturation, which the tech giant will be hoping the AI-supercharged Alexa will fix.
Alexa, as we knew it, wasn’t making money. Over $25 billion in losses were reported for the brand’s Devices business from 2017 to 2021, according to the The Wall Street Journal.
Enter Alexa+, Amazon’s long-rumored attempt to turn its voice assistant into a paid service. And with it, a whole new set of questions about what Alexa’s future really looks like.
For the last ten years, Alexa has been the reliable, if sometimes frustrating, assistant in my home.
My kids, aged eight and six, don’t remember a time before they could simply ask Alexa for a song, a bedtime story, or a light to turn on. It’s second nature to them in a way that still feels futuristic to me.
But if I have to start paying for that experience, I’ll be forced to reassess: is Alexa really worth it?
When rumors of a paid Alexa first surfaced, I was pretty skeptical (see ‘Remarkable Alexa sounds anything but‘).
It’s not that I don’t believe in paying for good services. But the idea that Amazon, a company that built its empire on convenience and accessibility, would suddenly put core Alexa functionality behind a paywall seemed counterintuitive.
Alexa’s success wasn’t just about its features; it was about the fact that those features were woven into daily life without a second thought. Start adding friction, and suddenly that equation changes.
Amazon’s new approach with Alexa+ seems to be banking on AI as enough of an incentive to cough up extra.
Although “cough up extra” isn’t entirely accurate as, if you’ve already got an Amazon Prime plan in place, you’ll get Alexa+ for no additional cost.
However, that’s the same model Amazon used to introduce Prime Video and Music Unlimited to the mix, both of which now have subscription tiers beyond what you get with your ‘free’ Prime access.
So while we’ll all get used to the smarter responses, a more conversational assistant, and deeper personalization, how long will that last and will the difference be significant enough to make us throw even more money, and even more data, at Bezos and the gang?
And the problem isn’t just whether Alexa gets more intelligent, it’s whether that intelligence actually translates into meaningful improvements in how we use it. Because let’s be honest: for years, Amazon has been telling us that Alexa was getting smarter, and yet, I still have to hear “I found more than one device with that name…” far more often than I should.
The bigger question though, is what will happen to the free version of Alexa? Amazon has said that a baseline Alexa experience will remain, but let’s be real; once there’s a paid tier and a better version, there’s an inevitable temptation to degrade the free tier just enough to push people toward paying.
Will that mean slower responses, reduced smart home integrations, or fewer new features? Of course it will.
If Amazon truly wants people – and particularly people like me (and hopefully you, if you’re reading The Ambient) – to pay for Alexa+, it needs to focus on making it the undisputed best-in-class smart home ecosystem.
That means fixing long-standing issues with device management, improving third-party integrations, and ensuring that Alexa is genuinely more intuitive and proactive in managing home automation. Not just throwing AI buzzwords at the problem and hoping enough people get on board.
The new AI powered Routine creator is a step in the right direction and will definitely help when creating and staying on top of complex routines… but can an AI-overhauled Alexa+ also maybe let us hide disabled devices on Amazon’s dedicated smart home hub, which is something basic Alexa is incapable of?
The reality is, Alexa’s dominance in the smart home space has already been slipping. Google Assistant has also been floundering, to put it politely, but Apple’s HomeKit has quietly been gaining traction, and independent platforms like Home Assistant and Homey are growing in popularity among enthusiasts.
Amazon still has the chance to lock down the mainstream smart home, but it has to make Alexa feel indispensable.
For now, I’m waiting to see what Alexa+ really brings to the table on the smart home front. If Amazon really does make improvements on the smart home front I’d be happy to pay for it.
But if it turns out to be just another AI-driven upsell with no real improvement to the way Alexa functions in my home, I might finally start looking at alternatives.
After all, I’ve spent more than ten years living with Alexa. Maybe it’s time to see what life looks like with something else.
