Trial Over
This morning I fired Alexa Plus for poor performance.
I started with her in July of '25 by buying a Show 8 that I really didn't want or need but I wasn't moving up the que fast enough to suit me. Ive been in constant battle with her about running my routines and even routines she wrote since then.
The last few days I've had lengthy discussions with her, mostly by keypad because I absolutely can't stop her from interrupting and repeating the same drivel. The topic has mostly about why she is so bad at running routines compared to Alexa legacy. If you talk to her long enough she'll explain why LLMs are the wrong tool for repetitive tasks like running routines and that it's completely possible to run both Legacy and Plus from the same device In parallel .
Here is the straw that broke the camels back. I take medication twice a day but I was quite often skipping the afternoon even though I left the meds out on the kitchen island in a bright red miniature fruit basket I had printed. This seemed like the perfect job for Alexa.
I needed an am and pm reminder that I couldn't ignore so I chose sound. By timer I set a routine to play music on the aforementioned Show 8 that sits on the same island. I could turn the music off by voice but I wanted more automation so I put the meds in a box with a lid and used a contact sensor that opened when the lid was removed. That turned the music off. So far so good but I had a contingency to cover. What if I took the meds before the trigger time. I now had a reminder in place that was no longer needed for the next doses so I needed a temporary cancel mechanism. I was having a problem with this and it was then that Alexa Plus got involved. She had a bunch of horrible ideas but when she taught me that enable and disable are action words she understands it all fell into place. By using another contact sensor as a switch the routine was simple. Push the switch to disable both am and pm reminders. Wait two hours and reenable both am pm reminders. That would work as long as I never took my meds more than two hours early.
This morning I had the occasion to use the cancel reminder button. Her reaction. "Let me work on that. pause I've disabled the am reminder". That's only the first line of the routine. What about the other three lines of instructions? When I told her she screwed up she ask how so I explained. Her response was to instantly write a new routine that reenabled the reminder in two hours.
At that point I got into another lengthy conversation (by keypad) to try to find out why she didn't read all four lines of instructions before she executed the routine. She apologized and said must have been in too big a hurry. A very human response that elicits sympathy and an unsaid promise to do better next time. Except she CAN'T. She is not in control and is incapable of improving. That's up to her trainers and developers. Ive had versions of that same conversation 20 to 30 times. Sometimes back to back. It's always an apology and "I should have" or "I shouldn't have".
At the end of that conversation I stated she should be fired for poor performance and that Amazon made a mistake trying to run routines with an LLM. She completely agreed with both statements. When I told her to disable herself she lied to me by saying I had to go into account settings blah blah blah. I told her again and she came back with how many improvements would be made in the future. I think I told her directly at least four times before she reverted me back to Legacy.
I then had to go into my routines and rewrite every one she had a hand in writing. Every line of command she wrote had been disabled.They were still there but greyed out and disabled.
I gave her almost a full year, not to mention all the years of development she was in before i signed up. We should have a safe self driving Tesla about the same time Alexa Plus is useful without aggravation.