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!"

> 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.

...how does that work, exactly? (or rather: what's the context here?); there's no possible way for an Alexa+-powered Amazon Echo to control my AppleTV or interface with VLC on my desktop.