Perhaps my favorite update of all is the assistant’s new smart home abilities. Since Alexa+ is better at understanding speech and meaning, you no longer need to use precise, almost-robotic voice commands to control devices in your home. Instead of saying “turn on the kitchen sink light,” I can say “turn on the light over the sink” and it knows exactly which light I’m talking about. If I say “it’s really damp in the bathroom,” it turns on the bathroom exhaust fan. It understands the context of your speech in a way the old Alexa never did.
This new level of understanding also applies to Alexa Routines, which you can create to automate multiple devices based on a voice command or when something happens in your home. Before Alexa+, you had to manually program routines in the Alexa app using “If, Then” statements and lots of checkboxes. It was tedious. But now you can tell Alexa+ what you want the routine to do and it will create it for you. For example, I asked it to turn on my backyard lights if my floodlight camera detects motion in the middle of the night. Without a hiccup, it created a routine that does exactly that every day between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
And in a small victory over the old Alexa, with the new version, you can control multiple devices using a single voice command. If you didn’t know, you used to have to say commands one at a time. “Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights. Alexa, set the thermostat to 72 degrees. Alexa, open the blinds.” Now you can issue all of those commands at once without having to wait between commands or repeat Alexa’s name.
As impressive as these improvements are, Alexa+ still has some bugs. For example, when I first set up Alexa+, it didn’t understand that I have a motorized curtain in my kitchen that it could open and close, even though I added it to the Alexa app. Then, weeks later, it suddenly recognized that the curtain exists and now controls it with simple commands, such as “open the kitchen curtain.” But that’s something the much dumber Siri was—and is still—able to do flawlessly.
