Amazon “forces” some users to upgrade to Alexa Plus

The launch of Alexa Plus represents Jeff Bezos’ strategic response to the advance of Google Gemini and other new generation assistants based on large language models. The goal is to transform domestic interaction into a more fluid and complex dialogue, overcoming the limits of old preset commands. However, the transition to generative AI is encountering technical obstacles similar to those already seen in the competition, where digital hallucinations and object identification errors have often compromised the reliability of home systems.

The community’s initial reactions highlight a marked resistance towards this new course. The main criticisms focus on a perceived alteration of the assistant’s vocal personality and, above all, on a significant increase in response latency, which makes the interaction less immediate than in the past. In addition to the technical problems, an aggressive management of promotional spaces emerges: several users report that, once downgraded to the standard version, the system would tend to send a large number of advertisements aimed at pushing the user to reactivate the advanced functions of Alexa Plus.