It’s hard to believe Alexa has been around for a decade now. In those ten years, Alexa has gone from a novelty to a cornerstone of our daily lives, and it’s a transformation that feels like it’s come full circle in my house.
For my kids, aged eight and six, using voice commands with Alexa is as routine as flipping a light switch. They’ve never known a world without being able to control things in their home with just a few words or to instantly summon any song and have it play instantaneously.
They don’t know how easy they’ve got it.
And neither do their parents. In the early days of Alexa, when we launched The Ambient and when I started covering smart home gadgets in depth, it all seemed pretty futuristic and we were constantly surprised at what Alexa was capable of.
Nowadays, saying things like “Alexa, it’s bath-time” – to kick start a routine that sets the bedroom nightlights, creates dinner lighting ambience downstairs, powers up the robot vacuum cleaners to take care of the kids’ dinner mess and locks the front door – is just something we do without thinking.
I’ve just had a look on the app and we’ve got 41 Alexa Routines set up in our house; around half of these are voice driven and the other half are timer or motion based. Some are super complex and involve numerous devices like the bath-time Routine mentioned above, some are as simple as a light coming on at a certain time.
But they’re all useful, making our daily routines more autonomous, and baked into our everyday lives in a way that we couldn’t have imaged just 10 years ago.
And I don’t think anyone at Amazon saw it going the way it did either.
Where it started
Alexa’s journey began with a small Polish startup called Ivona Software, a company that specialized in text-to-speech technology, that Amazon snapped up in 2013.
Armed with Ivona’s speech technology, Amazon built Alexa as the voice assistant for its Echo devices, with the original Echo smart speaker going live in late 2014.
What Alexa has become is exactly an accident, as has often been reported, but it has definitely evolved far beyond Amazon’s initial plans.
When Amazon first envisioned Alexa, it wasn’t aiming to create the comprehensive smart home system it is today.
The idea began as a way to make ordering from Amazon even more convenient and reorder products by voice, alongside stuff like allowing users to ask for weather updates, get news headlines or play music. The goal was more about simplifying tasks than building a full-fledged assistant.
However, as Alexa’s capabilities expanded – and as smart home technology surged – it quickly became clear that Alexa could be the central control point for an entire ecosystem of devices.
What truly propelled Alexa’s growth was Amazon’s decision to open the platform to third-party developers, inviting them to create “Skills” that added to Alexa’s range of functions.
This move sparked an explosion of new features, from home automation to games and wellness routines, turning Alexa into the all-purpose assistant we have today.
So while Alexa may not have been planned to be exactly what it is today, Amazon’s adaptability and timing positioned it perfectly to capture a new kind of user experience, propelling it well ahead of the likes of Google and Apple in the early days of the smart home revolution, and blowing the nerd/enthusiast focused SmartThings out of the water.
In many ways, Alexa’s journey is a blend of Amazon’s original vision and the unexpected potential it unlocked along the way.
We’ve all been along for the ride, and it’s been great…most of the time. Morning routines, evening wind-downs, and every reminder in between are seamlessly threaded together by Alexa’s voice. At this point, we take it all for granted, almost forgetting that the level of automation we enjoy would have been pure science fiction a decade ago.
But that doesn’t mean Alexa doesn’t have its fair share of frustrations.
For starters, the app has always been clunky, messy, and inconsistent, making the simplest adjustments needlessly complicated.
Anyone that uses Alexa to control Hue bulbs, for example, will know all too well what a chaotic complication that has become within the Alexa app, with Amazon’s assistant often adding the same bulb multiple times, creating rooms and zones that don’t exist, and not allowing you to delete lights that have been removed on the Hue side.
Everytime I hear “I found more than one device with the name… please give them unique names…” I can feel my eye twitching and the vein in my neck about to rupture.
And let’s not even get started on Alexa Skills. While Skills initially allowed Amazon to expand Alexa’s reach into countless third-party applications as I talked about, they now feel fragmented and unreliable at best.
I wince when a new device requires me to add a new Skill; I’ve been burned so many times by cumbersome account linking processes, buggy device recognition and Skills that simply refuse to work.
Privacy concerns, of course, often loom large, and while we’re reassured by Amazon that our data is safe, those worries are always there, especially as our devices continue to listen more and more.
Where it’s going
It’s hard not to feel that Alexa has hit a bit of a plateau.
At its launch, Alexa was revolutionary, a shining example of what voice control could mean for the future of our homes. But ten years in, it feels like Amazon built Alexa to about 80% of its potential and then just let it sit there, stagnating.
The magic is still there, sure, but it hasn’t evolved in the way I’d hoped, despite Amazon telling us year after year at its annual Fall hardware launch event, just how much more clever Alexa has become.
We haven’t seen the sort of meaningful upgrades in AI, personalization, or seamless multi-device functionality that other tech has seems to have achieved in the same time span.
In many ways, Alexa set a new standard for home automation and interaction, but it’s become a familiar fixture rather than an ever-evolving companion.
For all the transformative change it’s brought to my household, I’m left wondering if Alexa’s next big leap will ever come, or if we’ll continue with this almost-there assistant that, while helpful, remains just short of fulfilling its true promise.
There are reports that an all new Alexa is on the horizon, with Amazon seemingly going all-in on an improved voice assistant that will save the day for the company.
There have been rumors for years that Amazon may put Alexa behind some sort of paywall, with reports ramping up in recent months of a big internal project to turn the Alexa money tap on.
The so-called ‘Banyan’ project – AKA ‘Remarkable Alexa’ – is purported as a “conversational generative AI,” with users expected to “ask it for shopping advice like which gloves and hat to purchase for a mountain climbing trip.”
It’s said that the subscription-Alexa will provide “a new ‘Smart Briefing’ feature to provide daily, AI-generated summaries of news articles selected based on a customer’s preferences.”
Costing up to $10 a month, leaked documents discuss “AI features that help customers curate, summarize, and explore current events ” and drive “recurrent engagement.”
However, this all sounds a bit, well, naff. And the reports quote sources describing Banyan as a “desperate attempt” to turn Alexa into a profitable arm of the business in a “must win” year.
I get that Amazon needs to make money with Alexa. As useful as it us for our daily routines, it’s not very useful to Bezos and the gang if it’s not contributing to the bottom line.
But I think that focusing on the information angle is the wrong approach. Alexa has the potential to be the go-to smart home platform. The trouble is, I think the mentality inside Amazon is still to make Alexa a route to getting people buying more stuff.
Amazon stumbled into a decade of success for Alexa with this approach before. I’m not so sure it can get that lucky twice.
