Alexa Plus after a year of testing: better at running your home than your life

The Verge reviewer Jennifer Pattison Tuohy lived with Alexa Plus for a full year. The verdict fits in the headline of her review: Amazon's assistant, built on generative models, runs the home noticeably better than the old Alexa, but you can't yet trust it with your life. The most telling moment comes at the start of the piece.

The Echo Show in her office assembles "then and now" photo montages on its own: a toddler with his first tennis racket next to the captain of the school team, a hug with a teenage son next to a hug with a grown man. The author admits she cried more than once. Then an ad for an ugly brown leather chair appears on the screen.

Where Alexa Plus is genuinely good

The Memories feature pulls photos from Alexa Photos albums and pairs them with shots from different years. According to the author, it got very accurate at this over the year. For an LLM assistant, this is the right kind of task: it has to connect visual context, time and the people in the photos, then deliver the result at a fitting moment. Her son left for college, the office emptied out, and the screen brings up the past without the owner asking.

Amazon introduced Alexa Plus as an attempt to rebuild its voice assistant on generative models. At the announcement in February 2025, the company set the price at $19.99 a month and promised the service for free to Prime subscribers. The logic is simple: an assistant that understands ordinary speech and remembers context should become the center of the smart home.

Where it stumbles

After the touching montage, the assistant acts as if it doesn't know who is in front of it. The author sums it up in one sentence: it either does something truly impressive or behaves as if it is seeing you for the first time. The chair ad on the same screen shows the gap. One part of the system knows enough about the family to bring on tears. Another runs on the logic of an ad network and doesn't use that knowledge.

This is my conclusion, not a quote from the review. The device serves as a personal assistant and an advertising surface at the same time, and those roles have different goals. As long as they share one screen, trust in the "personal assistant" will suffer. Asking such a system to manage your calendar, shopping or family affairs is risky if, in the next window, it is trying to sell you furniture.

The test in brief

• Duration: about 12 months of daily use.
• Devices: the Echo lineup; the review mentions Echo Show, Echo Dot and Echo Max.
• Strengths: smart home control, photo montages in Memories.
• Weaknesses: full-screen ads on Echo Show, inconsistent "knowledge" of the user.
• Pricing: free with Prime, $19.99 a month without a subscription (2025 announcement terms).

The publicly available part of the review contains no benchmarks or latency tables. These are the impressions of a single reviewer over a long period, and their value lies precisely in that duration.

How to live with it

If you are considering Alexa Plus, judge it on everyday tasks: lights, climate, scenes, reminders, voice control. According to the review, this is where it beats its predecessor. Be careful about trusting it with broad personal errands. Before buying an Echo Show, check in advance which ad and promo blocks appear on the screen and whether you can limit them in settings. A photo album in Alexa Photos will come in handy for Memories, but first decide whether you are willing to hand your family photos to Amazon's cloud.

The full review, with details on each device, is published on The Verge.