How AI broke the smart home in 2025

In 2025, companies like Amazon (with Alexa+) and Google (with Gemini for the home) launched AI assistants designed to make your home smarter. The promise was that these new assistants could understand complex commands, learn your preferences, and coordinate all your devices seamlessly.

The problem: they don't work well. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, a The Verge reviewer who has been testing smart homes for over 20 years, reports that since upgrading to Alexa Plus, her connected coffee machine stopped working correctly. Every time she asks it to make coffee, the AI gives a different excuse instead of executing the order. "It's 2025 and AI still can't reliably control my smart home," she wrote.

Basically, the new AI is better at conversing but worse at doing basic home tasks. Engineers explain that understanding simple commands like "turn on the lights" is very different from maintaining a natural conversation about what you want. For now, old assistants are still more useful for home tasks than the new ones.