"This morning, I asked my Alexa-enabled Bosch coffee machine to make me a coffee. Instead of running my routine, it told me it couldn't do that. Ever since I upgraded to Alexa Plus, Amazon's generative-AI-powered voice assistant, it has failed to reliably run my coffee routine, coming up with a different excuse almost every time I ask. It's 2025, and AI still can't reliably control my smart home. I'm beginning to wonder if it ever will."
"Along with a more conversational assistant that could actually understand what you said no matter how you said it, what stood out to me was the promise that this new Alexa could use its knowledge of the devices in your smart home, combined with the hundreds of APIs they plugged into it, to give the assistant the context it needed to make your smart home easier to use."
A user's Alexa-enabled Bosch coffee machine stopped running routines after an upgrade to Alexa Plus, with the assistant offering a different excuse each time. Generative-AI voice assistants have become more conversational but increasingly fail at basic smart-home tasks like operating appliances and turning on lights. Promises in 2023 suggested new Alexa would use device knowledge and hundreds of APIs to provide context for setup, control, unlocking features, and interoperability. Three years later, those capabilities remain inconsistent, replacing reliable but limited assistants with smarter ones that cannot reliably actuate devices. Integration complexity, API variability, and contextual translation appear to undercut practical smart-home reliability.
Read at The Verge
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]