I’ve used Alexa to manage my shopping list for years. There are plenty of great list apps out there, but the convenience of adding items by voice anywhere in my house, pulling up the list on an Echo Show in the kitchen, and having it on my phone via the Alexa app has worked well for me. Until it didn’t.
Alexa Plus, combined with a redesign of the Alexa app that puts the generative AI-powered assistant front and center, has made the entire process so irritating that I’ve 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 couple of 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 pull up the list on my iPhone, it’s just a goddamn list. It’s not an ad for items I don’t want to buy from 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 started seeing more ads for the aforementioned Whole Foods products. Then I had to tap through 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 in there. In the Reminders app, that’s where there’s a nice big plus sign to add 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, tap add item, which takes me to a second screen where there’s a page of ads for Whole Foods items, and finally, a tiny text box up top where I can type in what I want.
The whole process takes five taps, and that’s with the shopping list tagged as a Favorite, so it’s accessible from the app’s front page. Well, it used to be. Now I have to swipe past a new Alexa Plus chatbot card to get to Favorites. So, make that six taps in total.
Using the Alexa app’s iPhone widget speeds things up a smidge, but it still pushes those Whole Foods images and Alexa Plus at me when all I want to do is put butter on my list. With Apple’s Reminders, it’s mostly one tap from opening the app to adding an item to the list.
I asked Amazon about the new Whole Foods product images page, and a spokesperson, Trang Nguyen, told me it was part of a short-term test.
Today, when I opened the list, I still had to click through to the second screen, but instead of big images of mostly Whole Foods products, it now showed a longer, more varied list of suggested products with smaller thumbnails.
Nguyen also said the app should remember the card I was on when I last used it and open to Favorites by default — as it used to do. But none of this changes the fact that the experience has become far too fiddly, 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 my way. Asking the new, smarter assistant to add something now frequently involves an entire diatribe — almost like it’s trying to show me how much smarter it is:
Me: “Alexa, add sour cream to my shopping list.”
Alexa Plus: “Looks like you’re already stocked up on that creamy goodness! Sour cream is already chilling in your cart.”
Maybe I’m just turning into a curmudgeon who’s stuck in her ways, but the extra commentary really bugs me.
I’ve repeatedly asked Alexa not to be so verbose, but it hasn’t listened, and the sour cream monologue was the last straw. While Siri and I have an uneasy relationship — no, I don’t want to ask again from my iPhone to see some web results — at least my shopping list is now clean, uncluttered, and ad-free.
The app’s new look is all about Alexa Plus
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The app’s redesign is part of Amazon’s push to make its generative AI-powered assistant a more generalist assistant, in the vein of ChatGPT and Gemini, rather than just an in-home helper.
When Alexa Plus launched last February, Amazon also said it would launch a new Alexa app. While this redesign is not that (at least I hope not, as a ground-up rebuild of the app is sorely needed), it does bring Alexa Plus to the forefront.
This week, the company announced that Alexa Plus has moved out of its Early Access stage and is now available to everyone in the US for free via the app and on the new 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.
The redesign is part of Amazon’s push to make Alexa Plus a more generalist AI assistant
Amazon wants you to be able to easily chat with Alexa wherever you are, and the app’s new look is an example of this. The chatbot is front and center when you launch the app — the home page is now an Alexa Plus card pre-filled with prompts based on what it thinks you might need. Then the smaller chatbot interface follows you across every single page of the app.
When Amazon announced the Alexa Plus updates earlier this week, I asked Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Echo, about the reason for the app changes. “It’s to bring Alexa to the front, have direct access to Alexa more simply in voice and in typed chat,” he said, adding that it’s capable of doing most everything you might want to do in the app.
“You can just directly tell Alexa what you want to accomplish, say changing a Setting, and she’ll either change it herself or tell you exactly where to find it,” said Rausch. But it can’t, apparently, add butter to my shopping list when I type “butter” into the chatbot on the shopping list page.
It’s unclear whether Alexa Plus can be a viable contender against the current players dominating this space. But as Amazon tries to make Alexa Plus happen, it feels like some of what’s actually useful about Alexa is becoming collateral damage. If it can’t handle something as simple as adding butter to my list without turning it into a soliloquy — or an ad — something has gone wrong.
Screenshots by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
