I'm so sorry to everyone. We should have warned you.
Oh yeah. Turn off all your devices. Mute your devices. Sorry.
Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Alexa Plus shopping list. I'm your friend David Pierce and today on the show we're going to talk about the smart home, specifically Alexa Plus, which is going through a bunch of changes right now. Amazon has been on a run of hardware announcements, new Ring stuff, new Kindle stuff, and today a new Alexa tablet, which is maybe the most surprising new Amazon device in years. All of it centered around the idea of getting Alexa Plus deeper and deeper into your life. Plus, Hayley has spent the last year testing Alexa Plus, and she has some thoughts about it. But first, here's what else is happening on The Verge today. This is 90 seconds on The Verge for Thursday, October 8th, 2026.
Some big news in the red-hot world of domain names. ICANN, the governing body for names and numbers on the internet, just released a batch of 1,600 applications for new top-level domains. Those are mostly called TLDs, and they represent the thing on the other side of the dot in your URL, .com or .gov, but also .pizza and .ai and everything else. The new batch is, surprise, all about AI. A bunch of big companies like Meta and OpenAI are fighting to own the .agent and .agi domains, while lots of companies are also trying to get their own brands turned into URLs. So you can imagine URLs ending in .fizz and .chatgpt and even apparently Applebee's all appear to be on the way. In an AI world, do we even type domains anymore? I don't know, but everybody still clearly wants the good ones.
Meanwhile, we're only a few weeks away from the launch of Grand Theft Auto 6, the most anticipated game in, I don't know, forever. There have been a lot of leaks already, including a brand new one that shows one of the main characters running around Vice City naked because this is GTA and that's what we do. You can also get in the mood for the game by going to Rockstar's website to listen to one of six of the game's radio stations or a bunch of the fictional podcasts made by fictional podcasters that will be available while you play the game. Frankly, I'm just outraged that the Vergecast won't be there.
And finally, Joe Rogan and Spotify have made a new deal. This one apparently worth around $250 million to keep the show on the platform. The Joe Rogan Experience is messy and complicated, but it is still the biggest show in the space. So, I guess it's not hard to see why Spotify still wants it. You can read more about all this at theverge.com. That is 90 seconds on The Verge for Thursday, October 8th, 2026.
All right, let's talk Alexa. The Verge's Hayley is here. Hi, Hayley.
Hi, David. So great to be back.
Hayley, I have been thinking about you a lot over the last several weeks because a thing that happens when you go on parental leave is you have a lot of time just sort of milling around your house where you're like legally not allowed to leave because there's a newborn baby nearby, but also they're asleep and you don't want to make any noise. And so what I've been doing is just wrangling every single smart device in my house. And it has driven me insane in ways that I was not sure I was able to be driven insane.
Yeah, I went through something quite similar actually recently and yeah, it's kind of like spring cleaning though, right? It feels good once it's all done, but during that process, you want to tear your hair out. And there were real moments of like going through my Alexa app and deleting devices that not only do I not use, that I have absolutely no recollection of ever using, that are just somehow connected to my smart home system, and realizing which bridge with 50 numbers at the end was which. Like there is something cathartic about the end of the process, but it is awful.
Especially the Alexa app. Wow.
It's so, so, so bad. I used to be able to go to the Alexa website many moons ago and you could delete things there and I miss that so much.
Oh, that would be so much better. Or here's a world. You should be able to ask Alexa this.
Yay. What a good idea, David.
Which brings me to what we are here to talk about. So, there's kind of two important things happening in Amazon land right now. One is Amazon is in the middle of a giant slew of hardware launches, new Kindles, new Ring stuff. There's a new Alexa tablet that just came out today. All kinds of stuff happening. And then on the other side, you have now been testing Alexa Plus, the supposed revolution in voice assistants from Amazon, for a year, and you put together a whole big piece on kind of what your experience has been and how you're feeling about Alexa. And these two things are obviously very tied together, right? This hardware is about Alexa Plus in meaningful ways. They are about baking Alexa Plus into more things and more parts of your life. So, I think we should start with Alexa Plus. A year in, you've been testing it, you've been living with it, you're deep in this zone. How are you feeling about Alexa Plus? We don't talk about it as a sort of general purpose right up there next to, you know, Claude and Gemini and all the others. But my sense is that has always been the goal of Alexa Plus. Do you feel like it's getting there?
So yeah, that does feel like the goal, to be a sort of ChatGPT or even a Claude or even a Muse now that Muse has arrived with its smart home integrations. Although I've not really found a lot of use for them yet, but you can see that path, like your AI agent controlling your home makes a lot of sense. Amazon already has an AI agent in Alexa Plus. Shouldn't Alexa Plus then also be your personal AI agent? And this could be because of my bias towards the smart home, but I just want my smart home assistant to be my smart home assistant. I don't like the bringing together. It hasn't worked for me. If it worked, maybe I would feel better.
But the ambition of Alexa Plus to be more than the smart home assistant hasn't sold me yet. I find that its attempts to break outside of its mold generally are frustrating and I'm not able to finish the task that I gave it. So I end up just having to go to my phone or go to my computer and it's like, why did I even start this a different way? I should have just started from my phone. I've just wasted my time.
But as a smart home assistant, everything that Amazon has been working on over this last year has started to come to fruition. I do feel like everything that it used to be able to do that it was frustrating because it didn't always do it well has got much better. When I first started testing this, so it was in beta, I started in like July. It didn't actually launch properly until February.
So now since February it's been available for anyone that wants to use it, either with a Prime membership or you pay $20 a month. If you pay $20 a month for Alexa Plus, I would like to hear from you. But yes, I've been testing it for over a year and most of that time has been okay. Amazon says this is our product, use it. And that has steadily got better.
So, give me a sense of what better looks like here because I think if I were to, on the smart home front in particular, if I were to think about the things that Amazon was promising, it was essentially much more conversational use, right? You don't have to learn the language. You don't have to get the syntax exactly right. You don't have to name all of your lights and remember what they're all called. You can just more functionally and more humanely talk to your home. That was one big one. And then the other one was you can do much more complicated stuff through that interface, right? They had lots of ideas about routines and lots of ideas about how to put all these things together. And the idea was just we are going to radically simplify the interface and thus make it more powerful on the other side. Is that a fair way to describe kind of what they've been trying to do?
Yeah. And I think they're halfway to that, more powerful. That's what's got a lot better. Like especially you were talking about setting up routines. Being able to set up routines with your voice is like the game changer. Because going into an app, fiddling with things like that, that's just not something that people generally have a lot of time or patience for. But being able to just say, 'Hey, I want the lights to turn on at this time every night and I want you to lock the door at this time every night.' And just say that to your Echo Show and it does it for you. That is a great experience and it works. And if it does it wrong or if there's something you don't like about it, you can go into the app and you can go and change it.
What I'm still missing and what I'm really hoping is going to be sort of the next wave is really deep integration with your devices. Right now there's a lot of turn on and off or you can do this but you can't do that. That next layer where your smart home assistant can control everything that your connected device can do is where I'm hoping that they're moving. Case in point, like right now smart lights are great. I can say to my assistant, turn all the lights in my office purple and it will do it. I can say turn all the lights to a nice sort of sunsetty glow and it will do it. But I still can't get it to do things like say set my washing machine to the delicate cycle because it doesn't have integration that deep. What we need is that more fine-grain control for Alexa to have.
And this is something that we're starting to see and is a real value of the smart home when it comes to these AI agents because the more data that you can feed into an agent, the more it can do for you. And you know, to your point earlier that this is where Amazon's moving. Is Alexa going to become like your personal assistant as well?
Ultimately I think Amazon really should stay in the smart home lane. That's what I would like to see. And then perhaps you could pull in your personal assistant and they could work together. And this is something that Google Home has started to offer. They've launched an MCP so you can use Claude to control your Google Home. So I feel like there is a future where we have all these different AI agents working for us in different elements of our lives and that we can orchestrate and we can pull together.
Right now, I'm not saying Amazon couldn't do this well, but right now I don't feel like it has the type of agentic things that Amazon has said Alexa can do for us. I have often just hit a roadblock when I've tried to use them, like ordering things from Uber Eats or booking trips or even booking tickets. I mean, occasionally it works and occasionally it doesn't and it's like, ah, that's just frustrating. But turning my lights on and off, managing my smart home, those things, it's doing much better. Not perfect. There's definitely still the occasional time where it goes off and does something just a little weird, or says something a little strange.
But overall it's been a big improvement since I first started testing it. And yeah, I mean it is the best smart home voice assistant you can use today in terms of functionality and understanding what you want it to do is a big change and that makes it much easier to use.
Yeah, I actually think in a funny way it is kind of a perfect example of what LLMs do really well, right? Which is take you rambling nonsensically and turn it into something sensible. I mean, and right, in so many ways, if you just look at every AI tool that is working for people, it looks like that, right? It's meeting notes where like we're going to sit here and talk for an hour and it's going to pull out all the stuff that matters and give us action items at the end. There are a million tools that are actually pretty good at that now. And this is very much the same thing where it can do a reasonably good job of figuring out what you meant without you having to perfectly exactly speak the language of the computer. And I think that's very exciting.
I do think there are lots of things left to do there. Like, it's funny you bring up the washing machine example because one thing I've been thinking about a lot is when you have three kids, you do just an infinite amount of laundry. This has been the major new change in my life is just infinity laundry all the time. What I cannot figure out how to do is get my system in some way to alert me when the washing machine is finished, right? And the best version of that is I just have a washing machine that is connected to Alexa and it does it automatically and everything is great. Those exist. They're very expensive and kind of wonky and it's just that that's not what I have.
There's also something that's like, okay, my washing machine makes a noise. Can I set up Alexa to listen for that noise and alert me when it makes that noise? The answer seems to be like kind of. I've gone down this road enough to figure out that it maybe potentially theoretically is possible, but I can't make it work. And it's just one of those things that it's like there are so many little fiddly pieces of just being a person in a house that all of this stuff, the long tail of this is going to be long for a long, long, long time.
But just the fact that I can do like one thing I was doing the other day was when I lock my front door, turn off the inside light and the outside light because we only lock our door at night. We live in a very safe neighborhood. If you want to come rob me during the day, please do. But when I lock the door, I want both of those lights to go off because it just means I'm going upstairs and going to bed. And that's like a simple routine that I could have programmed before but never did because it was just annoying. But I just set it once and it worked. And that is powerful.
That is. And there is a way you can set Alexa to listen for a beep. So you'd have to put an Echo in your laundry room and then listen for a beep.
Okay. I have one but it's all the way across the room and I actually think that might be part of the problem. I might need to like sit it on top of the dryer.
Yeah. But to your point there, and this is another area where I have seen improvement with Alexa Plus, and this goes to its agentic elements, is that it needs to understand your home. It needs to understand your whole home. That's where the magic and the power will come. And now some of the improvements include you can send things to it. You can feed data to it. So, like I can send it my daughter's school schedule and it will add it to my calendar. I can upload a recipe from a cookbook or from a website and it will add it to my cooking library. And so those types of elements that are going to make working in my home and moving around my home and doing chores and getting things done in my home easier and better, I think it has made a huge improvement in how well those integrations work.
It's just once you try and move outside of the home for me that it has started to fall apart and I'm just like, this isn't, I want the home to get better. I feel like I can see the path here and there's so much more that could be done. And the improvements have been immense from when I first started testing it. So yeah, and once it can understand all the context in your home, which you know, it's Amazon, so that's your choice if you want Amazon to know everything about your home.
But once it does have that context, one really good example is the Ring integration. So the Ring camera. So if someone rings my doorbell, I get an alert and it comes up on my Echo Show smart display. If I miss it, I can say, 'Hey, Alexa, when did the package get delivered?' And it will pull up the video, the last time that a package was delivered. And then it will also tell me what's in that package if it's from Amazon.
So, like you can just bring all of the pieces and parts together and present you with that information.
Creepy, yes. Useful also, yes. So, that's the balance, right?
Well, this is why you can also see why it's so tantalizing to Amazon to try to branch out even further, right? Because we've talked about this many times on the show, right? Everybody's business plan for AI is shopping in some way, right? That Mark Zuckerberg is like, we'll get some portion of the money that you spend. Where are you going to spend that money is on places like Amazon. And I think to a large extent everybody is making this giant bet that if we can shrink the gap between you see something in your house, you just look at it and you go, 'Oh, I need more of that.' And it'll just order it for you, accomplish goal.
This has been the dream of Alexa since the beginning, right? And you can see why Amazon looks at this and they're like, 'Okay, we have better language understanding. We have vastly better processing. We actually have the requisite hardware in a lot of people's homes already. We have to go capture the rest of this.' I think it's wrong and I don't think it's going to work. And I mean, there's just no evidence that this is actually a thing Amazon is good at, is putting all of those pieces together, particularly in a way that doesn't just involve your Amazon information.
But you can see why Amazon can't help itself from trying, which is part of why I find Alexa so fascinating.
Well, and so they've promised since this launch, they promised all these integrations that I was really excited for, like Expedia, so I could book a hotel or...
Right. This is supposed to be the whole thing. We talked about this, that like Amazon was going to go make deals and do API work and actually really integrate this stuff in a way that might work, and that it is not. I mean...
No. And you know, the shopping is a great example because in my house, I make an Amazon Alexa shopping list and then I want to order everything from there and I have to open my shopping app from my other, from my Instacart and I have to transfer everything. I even tried like asking Claude if it could take a screenshot and put it in here for me. But no, I have to do all the manual work. If I shop from Whole Foods, Amazon will do it all for me, but I don't want to shop from Whole Foods.
