For a while Alexa hasn’t worked as well for me as my wife, but lately things have gotten so much worse.
We have 4 Alexa devices in our house, and we use it mostly to play music, set alarms and cooking timers and activate devices with voice control. My wife also makes shopping lists, though they aren’t compatible with shopping list program I use so I don’t it for that.
My issue is how much Alexa actively ignores me, like when a reminder comes on and it just won’t stop (unless I mark it done on my phone).
And even with music attached to my Apple Music account it often can’t find songs, but lately it won’t play songs, or they take a while to start and then only play half way through and stop. This seems to happen about 60% of the time of late. Maybe it is the Apple Music thing, but I don’t pay for Amazon music above my Prime membership.
And Apple music doesn’t explain why I will be talking to one Alexa and ask it to play music and it will play music in another room about 25% of the time. And it isn’t like it can heard me from the other room. I can’t seem to get it to do this with commands myself and it just makes zero sense. Why would it play in another room and not the Alexa that is responding to me?
And I use it to control the light in the Baby’s and I would say that is about 33% successful. It works less than it doesn’t, and I am repeating myself. It is great when it works, but is super frustrating when carrying a screaming baby to get a diaper change.
And then there are the creepy ads that show up all over social media when my wife and I talk about things around Alexa. I fucking hate targeted advertising!
And now they are talking about making a paid tier of Alexa to make it better. Really? Fix what exists first!
Honestly if I could get a bunch of Apple HomePods for cheap enough I would love to replace our Alexa’s! At least Apple places some value on privacy, though I am sure there will have to be new models to deal with Apple Intelligence when that comes out and those will cost more!