The Amazon Alexa app is so bad that I’m using Siri again

I’ve used Alexa to manage my shopping list for years. There are a lot of great list apps out there, but the ease of adding items by voice anywhere in my home, pulling up the list on the Echo Show in the kitchen, and putting it on my phone via the Alexa app has worked well for me. Until it didn’t happen.

Alexa Plus, coupled with a redesign of the Alexa app that puts the generative AI-powered assistant front and center, made the whole process so annoying that I reluctantly switched to Apple’s Reminders app and Siri.

This is not what I wanted. I have Echos all over my house, but only a few HomePods, and Siri insists on saying my name every time I ask it to add something to the list: “Okay, Jennifer, apples are on your list.”

But at least when I view the menu on my iPhone, it’s just that Damned list. It’s not an ad for items I don’t want to buy at Whole Foods, or a way to try to get me to chat with Alexa Plus. Siri is annoying, but at least it stays in its lane.

The list experience in the Alexa app has been changing in small ways for a while now. First, I’m starting to see more ads for the Whole Foods products mentioned above. Then I had to click on two screens to add anything. Now, the new Alexa chatbot text box appears at the bottom of my list, prompting me to “Ask Alexa.”

It’s the worst place for it, as the instinct is to put what you want to add to your list there. In the Reminders app, there’s a nice big plus sign for adding an item. But when I typed “butter” into Alexa Plus, I got a guide to butter.

To actually add something to the list, I have to go to the top of the screen, click “Add Item,” which takes me to a second screen where there’s a page of ads for Whole Foods items, and finally, a little text box at the top where I can type in whatever I want.

The whole process takes five clicks, with the shopping list marked as favourites, accessible from the front page of the app. Well, it was. Now I have to swipe the new Alexa Plus chatbot card to access my favorites. So, make six clicks in total.

using iPhone widget for Alexa It speeds things up a bit, but it still sends me into pictures of Whole Foods and Alexa Plus when all I want to do is put butter on my list. With Apple Reminders, it’s often just a tap from opening the app to adding an item to the list.

I asked Amazon about the new Whole Foods product photo page, and its spokesperson, Trang Nguyen, told me it was part of a short-term test.

Today, when I opened the menu, I still had to tap to get to the second screen, but instead of mostly large pictures of Whole Foods products, it now showed a longer, more diverse list of suggested products with smaller thumbnails.

Nguyen also said the app should remember which card I was on when I last used it and open to Favorites by default — as it did before. But none of this changes the fact that the experience has become quite trivial, especially compared to adding an item to Reminders.

Of course, the easiest way to add something is by voice (no ads there), but here Alexa Plus still gets in the way. Asking the new, smarter assistant to add something now often involves a full-blown diatribe — as if he were trying to show me how smart he is:

Me: “Alexa, add sour cream to my shopping list.”

Alexa Plus: “Looks like you’ve already stocked up on that delicious sour cream! Sour cream is chilling in your shopping cart.”

Maybe I’m just turning into a curmudgeon stuck in her ways, but the additional comment really bothers me.

I repeatedly asked Alexa not to be so verbose, but she wouldn’t listen, and the sour cream monologue was the last straw. Even though Siri and I have an uneasy relationship — no, I don’t want to ever again ask my iPhone to see some web results — at least my shopping list is now clean, tidy, and ad-free.

The new look of the app is all about Alexa Plus

The redesign of the app is part of Amazon’s push to make it more popular Artificial intelligence-powered obstetric assistant A more general assistant, similar to ChatGPT and Gemini, and not just a home assistant.

When Alexa Plus launched last February, Amazon also said it would do so Launching the new Alexa app. While this redesign isn’t (at least I hope it isn’t, since there’s a desperate need to rebuild the app from scratch), it does put Alexa Plus ahead of the curve.

this week, The company announced Alexa Plus has exited early access and is now available to everyone in the US for free via the app and on the new version Alexa.com Website (where you can also access your shopping list). Prime customers and those who pay $20 a month can also access it on their Echo devices.

Amazon wants you to be able to easily chat with Alexa wherever you are, and the app’s new look is an example of that. The chatbot is front and center when you launch the app — the home page is now an Alexa Plus card pre-populated with prompts based on what it thinks you might need. The smaller chatbot interface then follows you through each page of the app.

When Amazon Announce Alexa Plus updates Earlier this week, I asked Danielle Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Echo, about the reason for the app changes. “The goal is to bring Alexa to the forefront, and have direct access to Alexa more easily via voice and text chat,” he said, adding that it is able to do most everything you might want to do in the app.

“You can just tell Alexa directly what you want to achieve, like change a setting, and she will either change it herself or tell you exactly where to find it,” Rausch said. But it seems that butter cannot be added to my shopping list when I type the word “butter” into the chatbot on the shopping list page.

It’s unclear whether Alexa Plus can be a strong contender against the current players who dominate this space. But as Amazon tries to achieve Alexa Plus, it feels like some of that is the case What’s actually useful about Alexa? They became collateral damage. If you can’t handle something as simple as adding butter to my menu without turning it into a monologue—or an announcement—something’s gone wrong.

Screenshots by Jennifer Pattison Toohey/The Verge