The many pluses and minuses of Alexa Plus

Amazon is determined to turn Alexa Plus into a do-everything AI assistant that can compete with Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and the rest. But after a year of testing, The Verge's Jen Tuohy has mixed feelings on how it's all going. And on whether a new tablet is the right way to fix it. Further reading: It appears .agent and .agi are about to be the hot new domains GTA VI leaks continue with a lengthy (and very nude) gameplay video GTA VI will have in-game podcasts and at least six radio stations Joe Rogan and Spotify renew massive podcast deal Alexa Plus is better at running my home, but it’s not ready to run my life Hands-on with Amazon’s Alexa Tablet 12 Pro and its wild new matte display Amazon is phasing out Fire Tablets because they weren’t ‘giving customers what they were asking for’ The Vergecast has been nominated for a Signal Award! You can vote to help us win here. Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I'm so sorry to everyone. We should have warned you.

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. Turn off all your devices.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Mute your devices.

• 0:04David Pierce?

  So sorry.

• 0:08David Pierce?

  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, Jen Tuohy on our team 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,

• 0:52David Pierce?

  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 .facebook and .chatgpt, and even, apparently, .applebees. 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 VI,

• 1:37David Pierce?

  the most anticipated game in, I don't know, forever? There's 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.

• 2:20David Pierce?

  That is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Thursday, October 8th, 2026.

• 2:26Speaker 02

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• 3:39David Pierce?

  All right, let's talk Alexa. The Verge's Jen Toohey is here. Hi, Jen.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Hi, David. So great to have you back.

• 3:45David Pierce?

  Jen, 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 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 reroutining 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.

• 4:13Speaker 00

  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.

• 4:26David Pierce?

  And there were real moments of 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 to actually do.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  It's awful, especially the Alexa app. Wow.

• 4:50David Pierce?

  It's so terrible.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  Really bad.

• 4:52David Pierce?

  It's so, so, so bad.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  They 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.

• 5:00David Pierce?

  Oh, that would be so much better. Or, here's a world. You should be able to ask Alexa this.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  Yay! What a good idea, David!

• 5:07David Pierce?

  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 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.

• 5:52David Pierce?

  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 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?

• 6:11Speaker 00

  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, and it has 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.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  But the ambition of Alexa Plus to be more than the smart home assistant hasn't sold me yet. It doesn't, 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,

• 7:37Speaker 00

  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.

• 8:14David Pierce?

  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.

• 8:57David Pierce?

  Is that a fair way to describe kind of what they've been trying to do?

• 9:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think that 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.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  What we're still, 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.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  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 sunset-y 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-grained control that Alexa to have, and this is something that we're starting to see and is a real value of the smart home when it becomes to these AI agents.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  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 Homes started to offer. You can actually use different, 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.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  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.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  But overall, it's been a big improvement since I first started testing it. And yeah, I, I, I mean, it's one of, it is the best smart home voice assistant you can use today in terms of functionality and understanding, understanding what you want it to do is a big change. And that, that makes it much easier to use.

• 12:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, I actually think in a funny way, it is, it is kind of a perfect example of what L L Ms do really well. Right. Which is take you rambling nonsensically and turn it into something sensible. I mean, and right that in so many ways, if you just looked 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, 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, 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

• 13:17David Pierce?

  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 is, this has been the major new change in my life. It's just infinity laundry all the time.

• 13:28David Pierce?

  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, 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, they're very expensive and kind of wonky. And I don't, it's just that, that, it'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 like gone down this road enough to figure out that it like, it may be 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

• 14:13David Pierce?

  that all of this stuff is just the, 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, if you want to come rob me during the day, please do. But we, we, I, 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, that's like a simple routine that I could have programmed before, but never did because it was just annoying. But I just said it once and it worked. And that is, that is powerful.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  That is. And, and there is, 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.

• 15:03David Pierce?

  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.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, but to your point there, and, and this is another area I've seen, 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, you know, from my, 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, me 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

• 15:53Speaker 00

  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, this isn't, I want, I want the home to get better. I feel like it's, I can see the path here and there's so much more that could be done. And the improvements have been, have been immense from when I first started testing it. So yeah, it's, 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, like one, one really good example is the Ring integration. So the Ring camera, so if someone rings my doorbell,

• 16:37Speaker 00

  I get an alert and it comes up on my show, 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.

• 16:55David Pierce?

  Whoa.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  So like you can, just bringing all of the pieces and parts together and presenting you with that information. Creepy, yes. Useful? Also yes. So that's the balance.

• 17:09David Pierce?

  Right. Well, this is why you can also see, 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? It's 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 saw something or you, you see something in your house, you just look at it and you go, oh, I need more, I need more of that. And it'll just order it for you, accomplish goal. Like this has been the dream of Alexa since the beginning, right? And you can see why Amazon looks at this and like, okay, we have better language understanding. We have vastly better processing.

• 17:53David Pierce?

  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.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:13David Pierce?

  But you can see why Amazon can't help itself from trying, which is part of why I find Alexa so fascinating.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  Well, and so they've promised, since, since this launch, they promised all these integrations that I was really excited for, like Expedia, so I could book a hotel or.

• 18:26David Pierce?

  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.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  And that it is not done.

• 18:35David Pierce?

  Where did it go?

• 18:36Speaker 00

  No. And you know, the shopping is a great example because in my house, I make an Amazon shopping, Alexa shopping list. And then I want to order everything from that. And I have to open my, my shopping app from my other, from my Harris Teeter 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.

• 19:04David Pierce?

  Amazon does not acknowledge the existence of other grocery stores. There is Whole Foods and there is nothing.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  They said you would be able to do this. And they said you would be, there's so many of these integrations with other companies that they promised and that still haven't come to fruition. And that is just frustrating because it's, it feels so close. But then it also feels like it's Amazon sort of locking in on its own. Like it's not letting news use amazon.com. And if we lock everything down and try and create these little walled gardens for AI, it's going to be a bad experience for everyone. This is the beginning of this, everything has to be open more so than it ever was. And Amazon with its Alexa was the original open smart home platform. And I think it needs to lean back into that and become the platform that people can use

• 19:52Speaker 00

  because that's the only way it's going to be really useful and successful.

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• 24:31David Pierce?

  Amazon's been on a run of hardware, and I think most of it makes sense, right? New Ring stuff, new Kindles. This all kind of makes sense for what Amazon is doing. They make better versions of old products. The Alexa tablet is kind of a wholly new thing. It is very much not a Fire tablet. It's $500. It is a full-on Android tablet. It is designed to be a true iPad competitor, kind of in every sense of the word, which is not a thing I thought Amazon would make. But I think the way you're talking about this, where A, they need something that works in more places outside of your home, they need something that has different kinds of context about you, that maybe you end up either building a smartphone or a tablet,

• 25:14David Pierce?

  and if you're Amazon, you probably can't talk yourself into building a smartphone again?

• 25:18Speaker 00

  And you have Panos, who is the tablet guy, right?

• 25:21David Pierce?

  Right. Oh, boy, does that man love a tablet. But do you look at this tablet and just think, oh, this is the logical extension of what they're trying to do with Alexa Plus?

• 25:30Speaker 00

  So I obviously didn't see the tablet until after I'd finished my year and my review of Alexa. And I was like, oh, well, this is what they're trying to do now. They're trying to make, this is where they will get your context. If you're doing all your work on your tablet, you know, if you're using Slack, I mean, because it's a full Android tablet. This is not a Fire tablet, which was frustratingly locked down. I know because my kids all had Fire tablets. This is like a full get things done. And so, yes, they could get, this is where the personal context can come. I believe that Alexa Plus can actually, if with permission, like read your screen and...

• 26:02David Pierce?

  It's basically Siri. Like, they're really trying to make it operate like Siri or Gemini, in that it is baked all the way across the operating system, which is a level of ambition we've really never seen from Amazon before in that way.

• 26:13Speaker 00

  And it is. I mean, the next step would be a phone, but this would give that personal context that they're currently missing. Assuming you're gonna, everyone's gonna go all in and this becomes their main interface. But tablets are generally companion devices to computers. So I don't know, is this gonna, are you gonna use this with your new Google Book? I mean, I just don't see where it's gonna fit into people's workflow. I can see that it's gonna be a great tablet for kids. The Fire tablets always have been, but it's, you know, I have the Pixel tablet up here, and I tried to sort of use that as a primary device because it has great smart home interface and controls. And I just never had a use for it because I have my iPhone and I have my computer.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  So I do think this is their move into, okay, we can get the personal context, we can be the more ambient assistant that's with you at home and on the go. And I'm sure we're gonna see more devices that bring Alexa on the go, which we have in the past, but they've never been very successful.

• 27:15David Pierce?

  You know what's funny about that, by the way, is Amazon was early to every hardware trend. Like, they did rings before rings was cool, they did glasses before glasses was cool. Like, I would not be at all surprised to see a bunch of that stuff come back out of the closet at Amazon now that there is actual market interest and they feel like they have tech that works. Because again, this is, if you're gonna do it, you have to do the whole vision, right?

• 27:39Speaker 00

  You have to do everything. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, and they need that whole ecosystem to really create this full personal AI assistant that's gonna be both your home and your personal assistant. But there's still gonna be friction between the two, especially because the home is a, you know, multi-user environment. And that, that's where things can quite easily go wrong. And that's why I feel like having an assistant in your home that really understands your home, knows what's happening in your home, can be separate from your personal assistant, but that you can bring the two together. But it, I mean, Apple is allegedly gonna be announcing a lot around the home coming up, and that's gonna be an interesting, like, reverse.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  They're trying to do what Amazon has already done. And it's gonna be interesting to see how they are able to merge home with personal because it's tricky and it's a big challenge. And if you're using AI, you want to give it some kind of agentic capabilities, which means doing things without necessarily checking. And that's where it's not so bad if it's on your phone, but when something like that happens in your home, that's a whole different ballgame. So, yeah, it's interesting to watch these two companies kind of come at the problem from the opposite sides. See who actually works.

• 29:03David Pierce?

  We should actually talk about Apple for a minute, because I think the end of the Alexa Plus story seems to be that for all of its sort of outward flaws, it is still the best, most complete home system, right? Like, especially...

• 29:17Speaker 00

  Voice assistant.

• 29:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Home assistant people will start yelling at the screen right now.

• 29:21David Pierce?

  Sure. But I think also in terms of like plug and play...

• 29:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 29:25David Pierce?

  Vastly compatible, almost anybody can figure it out.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:29David Pierce?

  It is, it is ahead of the pack at this point.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 29:32David Pierce?

  And that's a powerful thing for Amazon. And I think it's funny that Amazon still has the same problem as ever, which is what do we do beyond that? They just, they've spent all this time trying to figure it out, and even with this new rev in the technology, they are still stuck on this same problem, which is what do people want to do with this technology?

• 29:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:51David Pierce?

  And I'm still not positive Amazon knows the answer to that question. Apple, like you said, knows the answer to this question and is now trying to figure out, okay, how do we build all of this sort of ambient awareness into the rest of your home? So we've seen some reporting that suggests there's gonna be an Apple launch next Tuesday, the 13th. We've seen some leaks of what appear to be LG-made but Apple-blessed smart home devices, which is a thing I find very confusing.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  Yep. And it looks just like a Nest thermostat.

• 30:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, whatever happens next week, you will be on top of it, we will be on top of it. We've talked about the mythical HomePad device for a long time, but what...

• 30:30Speaker 00

  Please don't call it a HomePad.

• 30:31David Pierce?

  Oh, my God. If they call it a HomePad, I swear, see, I'm going back on parental leave if they call it the HomePad. I can't. But looking ahead to next Tuesday, what's kind of top of mind for you as you look at what Apple might be doing here? Like, this would be Apple's real, like, two feet into the pool leap into the smart home game. What are you thinking about as you get ready for this?

• 30:52Speaker 00

  So the biggest thing for me is how, is the Siri AI, the Siri AI for the home. Because if they're launching a smart display, we have done smart displays. No one has really created the ideal smart display. Amazon's Echo devices, Echo shows are the best in class right now. They got a lot better, but they still, they're not, they're not the sort of embodiment of artificial intelligence in your home. They're just an interface.

• 31:20David Pierce?

  Yeah. I still think the Pixel tablet was the correct idea and that everyone should be copying that, but that's another Verstappen.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  R.I.P. But yes, what I think Apple can differentiate here and why I assume this has taken so long because they've been waiting for Siri AI to catch up, is that the interface is the AI. Like, it is not just a touchscreen. It is that it is much more deeply embedded into your smart home. So the Apple intelligence for the home is gonna be, I'm hoping the differentiator here will be that it can really truly understand and control. And to my point earlier about how Amazon needs to connect into everything and have control over all the devices, not just on off, you know, the things that work with Apple Home intelligence, in particular, maybe these new LG devices, but maybe this is what's

• 32:11Speaker 00

  going to differentiate them, will have this sort of extra layer that can really, that where the Apple intelligence can really understand what's happening in your home, take the context that it can get both from your personal and your communal devices, and be a more proactive, more helpful, more embedded assistant in the home, rather than just a sort of interface that you control devices with. It's a big leap. It's what Amazon's been trying to do for a long time. And I think this is really the only way that Apple can truly differentiate in this space is to do something, to take a big leap forward with Siri AI in the home. Because Siri in the home today...

• 32:52Speaker 00

  Very limited, but we've seen the beginnings of the Apple Intelligence for the home. I did a piece a couple of weeks ago about how the video descriptions, the element, these new elements that Apple Intelligence have brought to HomeKit Secure Video. It can describe what it sees in your home. All of that is data. It can feed into understanding how your home runs and how you, how you want things to happen in your home. And other leaks from Bloomberg include a new camera that will potentially capture data without recording, which is going to be interesting to see. But this is another big challenge we've had in the home. If you feed the data, you get better results, but people don't want cameras keeping an eye on everything they do.

• 33:36Speaker 00

  So yeah, if, if they can find that balance and really understand your home and what you need and what you want and respond proactively, that's going to be a really killer product, although I have a feeling that it's going to cost a lot of money.

• 33:50David Pierce?

  I agree. I'm, I am really looking forward to seeing what kind of privacy case Apple makes here because I think even the Apple Watch feature recently where it's like, it is where you can sort of go back and replay previous conversations, like even that, which is not quite as invasive as it is made out to be, freaked people out and for good reason. Right? So I think Apple is, has a really tough needle to thread here to say, we are doing all of the things that you find useful and we're going to do it in a privacy preserving way, but also there's a camera. That is a hard, hard, hard case to make at this particular moment in our lives and the tech industry.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  It is. It's, it's going to be a big challenge, but I think for anyone that uses a smart home, we've always got to remember this sort of cost benefit ratio. And I always, I like to compare it to Gmail. Like you use Gmail because it works really well and does make your life easier. Yes, there are some privacy payoffs and that's something you have to weigh. I would love to get to the point where the smart home is completely local and I've written about this at length, but the value, the value add comes from connecting to the cloud in many instances. And you know, you just have to be able to sort of decide how much does this benefit me and is it worth potentially risking my privacy?

• 35:10Speaker 00

  Although Apple and Amazon, they, they do talk a very big talk about how well they protect your privacy and how well they protect your data. So it basically comes down to who, who do you trust with this information? And I think our readership is probably skewing Apple.

• 35:27David Pierce?

  But also increasingly skewing nobody.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  That's very true.

• 35:31David Pierce?

  Right? And I think, I think that's the hard, that's the hard thing for all of these companies to deal with is there's, there's, the, the climb is more and more uphill for everybody all the time, right as all the technology is starting to work. Right? Like that is the, it's the strangest piece of this to me is everything we've been waiting for, for a decade is starting to become real in real ways, right as everybody is starting to realize, maybe we never wanted this.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  Never wanted it.

• 35:56David Pierce?

  And I think that, that tension is like the only thing I care about in tech right now. I think it is so fascinating and it really comes to the head most with Apple all the time, which is I think why it is so, if anybody was going to trust a company, it has been Apple for decades and even that is starting to erode and I find that fascinating.

• 36:14Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, I mean, the, the HomeKit Secure Video, the new features, they all use the cloud, whereas the old HomeKit Secure Video didn't. So you're, you are having to give away more of your data. This is something I wrote about a while back, but I really feel strongly, I think eventually we're going to get, get to the point where this all has to run entirely locally in our homes. It may, it's going to be a more expensive upfront investment, but ultimately you're going to feel more comfortable and you know, local AI, it's going to be a while, I think, until we get to the point where their capabilities are as good as what we have in the cloud. But I think we will get there. And I, I agree with you though, it's an interesting tension and the journey to that point. And also whether it's valuable enough to spend the type of money you're going to need

• 36:58Speaker 00

  to spend in order to have something like this operate inside your home. It's going to be, it's a hard sell.

• 37:04David Pierce?

  Indeed. All right. Well, whatever happens next week, we will be back here talking about it. There's, there's just a lot of smart home stuff coming. I have not made fun of you about Matter in two months and I will not today, but I will very soon. But until then, Jen, thank you for being here. It's good to see you.

• 37:19Speaker 00

  You're welcome.

• 37:20David Pierce?

  All right. That's it for the show. Thank you to Jen for being here and thank you as always for watching and listening. I am sorry again for all of the times we set off all of your Alexa devices. There's one more. I apologize. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, if you are using Alexa Plus for something cool and interesting and you want to tell us about it, I would absolutely love to hear about all of it. Send us an email, [email protected], call the Vergecast hotline, 866-VERGE11. We love hearing from you. And as a reminder, the best thing you can do to support all of this is to subscribe to The Verge. You get all of our podcasts ad free, you get our subscriber newsletters, everything. Theverge.com/subscribe. Thank you in advance. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Lartre. We'll see you tomorrow. Rock and roll.

• 38:07Speaker 06

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