is a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
This morning, I asked my Alexa-enabled Bosch coffee machine to make me a coffee. Instead of running my routine, it told me it couldn’t do that. Ever since I upgraded to Alexa Plus, Amazon’s generative-AI-powered voice assistant, it has failed to reliably run my coffee routine, coming up with a different excuse almost every time I ask.
It’s 2025, and AI still can’t reliably control my smart home. I’m beginning to wonder if it ever will.
The potential for generative AI and large language models to take the complexity out of the smart home, making it easier to set up, use, and manage connected devices, is compelling. So is the promise of a “new intelligence layer” that could unlock a proactive, ambient home.
But this year has shown me that we are a long way from any of that. Instead, our reliable but limited voice assistants have been replaced with “smarter” versions that, while better conversationalists, can’t consistently do basic tasks like operating appliances and turning on the lights. I want to know why.
I’m still waiting on the promise of voice assistants that can seamlessly control my smart home. Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
This wasn’t the future we were promised.
It was back in 2023, during an interview with Dave Limp, that I first became intrigued by the possibilities of generative AI and large language models for improving the smart home experience. Limp, then the head of Amazon’s Devices & Services division that oversees Alexa, was describing the capabilities of the new Alexa they were soon to launch (spoiler alert: it wasn’t soon).
Along with a more conversational assistant that could actually understand what you said no matter how you said it, what stood out to me was the promise that this new Alexa could use its knowledge of the devices in your smart home, combined with the hundreds of APIs they plugged into it, to give the assistant the context it needed to make your smart home easier to use.
From setting up devices to controlling them, unlocking all their features, and managing how they can interact with other devices, a smarter smart home assistant seemed to hold the potential to not only make it easier for enthusiasts to manage their gadgets but also make it easier for everyone to enjoy the benefits of the smart home.
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