Alexa Is Five Years Old, So Why Does She Still Suck?

Alexa has officially been around for five years, and this article asks a good question: why hasn’t she improved? The pitch from Amazon was that Alexa would always be listening, and always improving. Half a decade later, she seems no smarter than when we first got her. In our house Alexa does little more than set timers and remind me how much the Redskins lost by every week. What was magical five years ago, today has become ordinary. As the article notes, it’s time for Amazon to step up.

Yet the flip side of the argument is, perhaps the goal of this initial wave of Alexa-enabled devices was never really to do much more than introduce and get consumers comfortable with the idea of having a listening device in their homes. After all, the data Alexa gets from listening to us is arguably far more valuable than the service we are getting. And this seems unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.