Is It Just Me, @Alexa99?

Apparently not. A little bit of web searching pulls up all kinds of "is my Echo Dot just broken?" and "has Alexa gone nuts?" material from the last few weeks.

Shortly after I returned from that Memorial Day weekend trip, Tamara mentioned that the Echo Pop in our living room hadn't been responding.

So I tested it:

"Alexa [blue 'I'm listening' light comes on], what time is it?"

No response [blue 'I'm listening' light goes off].

Unplugged and plugged back in to reset.

Same problem.

Unplugged and plugged back in again to reset again.

Fixed.

For a little while. Seems to do that every day or so. Sometimes one reset gets it working again. Sometimes it takes two.

Same story with the Echo Pop in the bedroom.

But not the old-fashioned ("3rd Generation") Echo Dot in my home office.

At least not yet.

Maybe because I don't use it as much? Or maybe because there's been some kind of buggy software update for later, but not earlier, device generations?

I understand Amazon's Alexa division has had layoffs. And that they're planning to introduce a higher paid tier of more AI-enabled service. And so on and so forth.

I jumped on the Alexa bandwagon fairly early, and I think I was the kind of customer they were looking for when they sold the devices at cost in hope of using Alexa to drive sales in other areas.

They make additional money from me every month for their higher-tier music service.

I often add consumables to my Amazon cart based on Alexa reminders that it may be time to purchase more laundry detergent, etc.

My natural inclination is to continue dancing with the gal what brung me, but if these reliability issues don't get fixed soon I'll be looking into other options for my "voice-activated personal assistant/music streaming speaker" services.