I Lived With Alexa+ for a Week. Here’s How It Went (2025)
Alexa + manages to answer quickly, even listening to a more complex question and giving a more complex answer. She usually manages to answer all my questions too – either of “HMM, I’m not sure how to answer this” that I heard too much from the original Alexa. She gave me this answer to even simple questions – suggestions for tenders during a cloudy day at the zoo, for example, or where we can book a table for dinner, or if Kesha has tickets on sale for her visit. Alexa + can tell me precisely the details of the calendar, and he controls my smart house with much better speed than the Google speakers that control my house since the year. I also like that I can access the conversations I have had in the past via the Alexa application. They are gathered by the initial question that I asked, which allows you to easily browse conversations and see what Alexa’s answers were.
Alexa + will also use the camera to recognize you and other members of the house if you configure their profiles too. My echo shows will display “Hello, Nena” when I approach them and suggest things in the for you section on the home page that I remember that I like to do, like the air arts and go to the zoo. Alexa + also did a good job by ignoring when I mention with casualness her name in the conversation, and although my initial thought is that due not to look at the camera, my other tests revealed that it was good enough to ignore her name if it was in the middle of the sentence, even if I watched it.
Alexa + is not yet perfect or finished. I met hiccups – for example, when asked questions about the closest donut stores, she provided me with shops in the city in which I live, even if I was currently in a different city. However, these problems have been easily corrected by providing it with more context. Her funniest response was when I asked the weather for the zoo, trying to see if she knew how to refer to the San Diego zoo, and instead, she gave me time for Zaō, Japan. But the next time I asked questions about the weather in San Diego proper, then what to bring to the zoo, she properly deduced from which zoo I was talking about.
New excavations
Photography: Nena Farrell
Although I can make all the original requests that I would usually do with Alexa +, there are a lot of new things to try.
