I’m going to start with a caveat from the top: This is not a formal product review. That’s not my background nor expertise, and if that’s what you are looking for, you are likely to walk away at least a little bit disappointed.
What this is, is a first impression based on hands-on experience with the new Alexa from someone who was once a consistent user of Amazon’s original voice assistant. Back then, I relied on Alexa for the kind of straightforward things many of us did every day: playing music, checking the weather, requesting sports scores, setting timers, and answering the types of questions that grade-school kids would get a kick out of (“Alexa, who would win a battle between a lion and a snow leopard?”). But over the years, Alexa’s performance seemed to deteriorate—it had more trouble understanding basic requests and definitely could not hold a conversation like popular AI chatbots could. Eventually, my family’s interest—and patience—waned.
