Alexa, shame on you

I don’t ask much of Alexa. I really don’t.

"Alexa, all lights on"

"Alexa, next song"

"Alexa, weather"

And somehow, it still manages to baffle me with how poorly it performs. Five years ago, I saw this thing as magical. Somehow, it was able to take my voice from across the room, convert it into a command, and do what I wanted it to do most of the time. But times have changed.

Today, we have large language models which can write hundreds of lines of working code, understand voice with near-perfect accuracy, and actually generate audio waves instead of just using text-to-speech. 4 years of incredible, mind-blowing advancements – and Alexa hasn’t changed a bit.

Here is something that happened this morning:

"Alexa, play the previous song again"

"Here is a song you recently played"

I don’t know how Alexa works under the hood. I’m sure it’s very complicated and not something that can be upgraded easily, but it’s down right embarrassing that in this day and age, Alexa can’t play the previous song about half the time I ask it to. It fails to turn on/off all the lights in my apartment maybe a third of the time. It randomly disconnects from my smart home devices. I’ve completely given up on trying to program a scene into it.

I know I’m complaining a lot, but come on. We deserve better.

Please, Amazon, fix Alexa.