Alexa+ is designed to be better at understanding your requests, more personally tuned, and capable of more natural conversational interactions rather than rigid commands. To me, it felt like interacting with a synthetic bridge troll haranguing me until I said the magic combination of words. The AI assistant can be so persnickety that I let out an exasperated sigh at least once during every interaction in my kitchen as I trudged over to the remote or touchscreen in resignation to finish something Alexa+ struggled to accomplish.

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It has become a running gag in my household trying to guess what musician Alexa+ will play on YouTube when requesting a song. A request for some Charli XCX was answered with Sombr’s “Back to Friends.” Instead of The Black Keys, I got Alabama Shakes. When it’s not playing a similar artist, Alexa+ sometimes searches a phrase on YouTube and leaves me to choose a video from the results.

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Maybe switching video apps would get me better results, so I tried HBO Max. On my home screen, Alexa+ showed me a thumbnail for The Pitt as a TV series I should check out next. Sure, why not? Seems like everyone else is watching that show, so I’m curious. After asking multiple times, the most Alexa+ could do via voice control was open the HBO Max “Who’s Watching” page.

After it failed at this, I followed up by asking, “Alexa, did you play an episode of The Pitt?” The AI assistant claimed multiple times that it was actually playing an episode when it was in fact not. Alexa+ said I wasn’t seeing the show because it was paused. When I asked the bot to resume the supposed episode it was playing, it replayed some nature sounds I had on earlier in the day.

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