> Seems like an agent given 20-30 tool calls like "read_sms" "matter_command", and "send_email" would be able to work out what to do for things like "set the house to 72° and text Laura that I did it."

Incidentally, a major headline in the news this past week was about a coding-agent that wiped its company's entire system, including backups; which the company's staffers were confident was utterly impossible (as it didn't have any access to that system), and yet somehow, it did[1] (the TL;DR is the agent randomly came across an unprotected God-tier admin API-key/token saved to a personal text-file in a filesystem it had read-access to). If an agent can do that with only read-only access to a company's routine/everyday storage area then there's no way I'm giving it the ability to deactivate my house's fire-alarms and security-cameras via Google Home/Matter/Thread/HomeKit/X10/OhFfsNotAnotherCloudBasedAutomationScheme.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/27/cursoropus_agent_snuf...

I'm not an Alexa user myself but I have watched my wife interact with it for around 5years now.

The new Alexa powered by an LLM is objectively better that previous Alexa in a few ways. This much was apparently from day one and has only gotten smoother.

1. It can reliably execute direct or vague-ish commands "play X movie in app Y" or "play x show" and can infer X movie is only available in app Z so use that.

2. Speech recognition seems better (less instances of 5x round trips)

3. Conversational with multi-turn --- my wife can have a back and forth clarifying a topic.

4. Seems to understand intent a bit better. (user asked A so they are probably thinking about B)

Those may seem small but they were a tremendous source of annoyance for her -- and thus for me -- "Alexa is not listening, do something!"

No matter how good the LLM features are, I just want to turn my lights on and off and check the time. A perfect LLM could maybe perform on par with a simple deterministic command system for these tasks, but not better. All an LLM does is introduce the possibility that a command that worked fine yesterday will randomly not work

Also, one of my first interactions with this Alexa+ thing was “how long is it until 8:45am”, one of only a few commands I use it for to work out how much sleep I’m getting, and it proceeded to ask me what the current time was… I immediately turned it off after that

> that tried it at the start and then gave up because of a bad experience

I've had enough bad experiences with products that never got better, or just got worse (Exhibit A: Windows 11). Like most primates, I am capable of learning, and I've learned that once a consumer product/service goes bad there's little hope of a turn-around. I accept that you're telling me that it's gotten better, but of the people I know IRL who also use an Echo, none of them have told me that Alexa+ is worth trying, let alone committing to.

Yes, it's on me for not giving Alexa+ a second chance, but I'm not willing to give Alexa+ a second chance because, as a technology product/service customer, I just don't feel respected by the industry I work for (...lol); if Amazon, Microsoft, Google, et al won't respect me, why should I venture outside my comfort-zone for... what benefit, exactly?

It's not the early 2000s where just messing around and wasting time on this stuff is cool in itself. None of that time wasted turned into much long term apps that stuck with me. Maybe a banking app and a trail running app.

I ruined multiple dinners with timers that didn't work (with a time/labor cost).

I had to get out of bed in the freezing to turn the lights out. It's easy to hit the lights when I go to bed but annoying having the tool fail and getting back out.

Music stuff didn't work well because I used Youtube Music not Spotify.

Those were my 3 use cases for Google voice, and it failed them all enough I just stopped using it all together. Who cares if it works today if in another month they just change something and break it again? They've shown it's not a tool to use for tool things, it's a 'gee wow' thing. I don't need to be impressed. I need not burnt food.