I liked some of Alexa+’s new capabilities, such as booking a table at a restaurant and generating long stories and reading them to my 3-year-old.
The new Alexa is also better at handling multistep requests. “Set three kitchen timers for 15, 25 and 45 minutes” and “write a one-day itinerary for a trip to San Diego and send it to my email” were two prompts that worked for me.
And Alexa+ doesn’t require you to say its wake word every time you talk to it, so you can go back and forth or ask it follow-up questions, which is a nice change.
The bad news is that despite its new capabilities, Alexa+ is too buggy and unreliable for me to recommend. In my testing, it not only lagged behind ChatGPT’s voice mode and other AI voice assistants I’ve tried, but it also was noticeably worse than the original Alexa at some basic tasks.
When I asked Alexa+ to cancel an alarm the other morning — a request I had made to the old Alexa hundreds of times with no issues — it simply ignored me.
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