Saturday, June 21, 2025

Not Ready For Prime Time (Pun Intended) ...

I got an email yesterday letting me know that I could exercise "early access" privileges to Alexa+ -- "your new personal AI assistant that gets things done—she’s smarter, more conversational, more capable, and free with Prime."

The first thing I noticed was that the female voice coming out of my Echo Dot was different than (and, in my opinion, not as nice as) the previous version.

The second thing I noticed was that the new voice was telling me that the "new, improved" Alexa can't do something the old Alexa has been doing for years, something I have Alexa do every day -- read a book to me from my Kindle library.

IIRC, the word "yet" was used in that response, and when I told Alexa+ to end my "early access" privileges and revert to "old Alexa," it did so with a sort of half-apologetic compliance noting that the Alexa+ feature set isn't complete yet and that more stuff is coming, so try again later.

I use Alexa to check the time, check the weather, check the price of Bitcoin, set alarms/timers, answer random questions that come up in conversation ("Alexa, is Miguel Ferrer still alive?" was one from yesterday -- sadly, he is not), listen to music, and have myself read to sleep from Kindle.

Until Alexa+ can do all of those things, it's less useful to me than old Alexa, even if it can do all kinds of new things. I've been getting by without it doing those new things for me for 58 years; but I've become reliant on it to do the old things over the last eight years or so.

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