Amazon's smart assistant can finally run your home - it just won't stop trying to sell you a recliner while it does.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy spent a full year living with Alexa Plus, Amazon's AI-upgraded version of its voice assistant, and the resulting review reads as a genuine split decision. She describes real delight: an Echo Show in her office that automatically builds then-and-now photo montages of her son growing from toddler to college student, enough to make her tear up. Then a full-screen ad for a brown leather recliner interrupts the moment. Her conclusion is that Alexa Plus is meaningfully better at the mechanical job of running a smart home than the old Alexa, but still can't handle mixing sentimental, personal features with hard-sell advertising.
That tension matters beyond one reviewer's living room. Amazon has spent over a decade putting ads on devices people already paid for, from Kindle lock screens to Fire TV menus, and folding that same habit into an assistant built to feel personal makes the mismatch far more jarring. It also points to the real open question for Alexa Plus: whether Amazon's ad business and its ambition to make Alexa a trusted household presence can coexist, or whether one keeps undermining the other.
A smart home that remembers your kid's childhood and then tries to sell you furniture isn't broken - it is just honest about whose interests it ultimately serves.