Alexa at 10: Amazon's assistant is a winner and a failure

27:38And so it's like, it knows what I want, right? Like that is not the challenge. And you would think that yelling at a speaker from across the room would be a hard problem. And it is, but actually, again, from pretty close to the very beginning, Amazon more or less solved that problem. There's somewhere after that first step of like, I have declared my intention to my device and my device has registered that intention correctly, and then it falls apart. And it has never, that part, like you're saying, has never gotten, I would say, even meaningfully better, much less very good. No, I agree. And that's where the Star Trek computer idea came in, you know, that this device could sort of manage your home for you.

28:21I mean, Alexa leaned hard into the smart home as soon as they realized that this was, you know, a great use case for voice control, you know, even though it wasn't part of the initial plan. But to begin with, it was incredibly clunky. And, you know, I've spent the last eight years trying to use Alexa to run my smart home smoothly. And my sort of touch point throughout this time has been like a good morning routine. Like this is what you always hear about when you talk about voice control and smart home. It's like you can set up this good morning routine, good night routine. I'm leaving routine and your whole home will just work magically.

28:59And I, from the days of Wink, remember Wink? Oh, yeah. That was one of the first. I try not to remember Wink, but every once in a while. That was one of the first smart home hubs that worked with Alexa. And you used to have to say, trigger my good morning routine. And my husband still says trigger every time he asks Alexa to do something. Oh, my goodness. I'm sorry. This is good. We're leaving all of these in. This is the point, people. There are so many in my house. Alexa, do not disturb. See, this, it never gets right. But yes, so over the years, I have tried to, you know, it's sort of as had been my touch point, like whether we have reached a sort of magical moment where the smart home just works.

29:47And, you know, this kind of goes back, you know, it circles back to Star Trek with, you know, I think the infamous line, and I can deliver it in an English accent and I will do my best. Computer, tea, Earl Grey, hot. That was good. I don't do a good Picard, sorry. I have to get my Shakespeare on. It was Starling. I approve of that. But yes, you know, so, and for me, it was coffee, black, strong. And I wanted, I wanted to get out of my bed. I wanted the lights to turn on. I wanted BBC Radio 2 to start playing. I wanted a coffee to start brewing. Maybe, you know, my shower to start running, thermostat to adjust.

30:30And then say 20 minutes later, the kids' lights in their room go on. Their alarm goes off. You know, things that I would have to go and do manually myself, but having a smart home assistant do all of this for me, save me time in the morning, make me less stressed, make everyone happy. And so the first problem I came across was a personal one, but one that really kind of goes to another key area where the smart home in general and Alexa hasn't succeeded, which is context. So my husband has been for most of his career a shift worker. So he works 24-hour shifts and then he would come home and sleep for 12 hours.

31:10So for me, having a motion sensor or using voice to start my morning routine was not going to work because I would wake him up. And also, I only wanted the bedroom lights to turn on when he wasn't there, not when he was there. so you know there was not there's nothing that Alexa could do to differentiate didn't have the context of what was happening in in the room then the other issue was trying to use a motion sensor to trigger a routine it's something you've only really been able to do in the last couple of years motion sensing support for Alexa was really spotty for years it worked through Zigbee initially but nine times out of ten a Zigbee motion sensor you connected to Echo would either not stay connected or wouldn't work.

31:53And again, maybe not Amazon's problem, but when you're connecting to different ecosystems, you need your smart assistant to be able to troubleshoot these things for you so that you don't have to spend 30 hours a week troubleshooting your smart home to get these things to work. And then the fresh brewed coffee. This is a capability that we should have had years ago. You can rig up a smart plug if you have the right type of coffee machine that has a physical on-off switch, or you have a smart Alexa connected coffee machine that on average costs between$1 ,000 and$2 ,000. There's one from Spin, and then there's one recently from Bosch.

32:39There's just so much friction. So I'm testing the Bosch coffee maker, And in theory, it should make me a latte when I say good morning. But I spent, in preparation for when I was sort of researching all this, I spent about four hours trying to get her to work. This is the, like, key Alexa calculus that has never tipped in Alexa's favor, right? Yes. And a lot of what you just described, you can, in theory, set up. Right. Like, one of the things Amazon has tried to do, to its credit, is enable some of this stuff. Right. And I get a lot of crap on this show for hating Apple shortcuts because it gives you a lot of power, but it is essentially a really complicated scripting language.

33:27And so, sure. Right. If you are willing to do the work to learn all of that, great. The problem is then you've spent a bunch of money. You've done a ton of work. It doesn't work all the time. And then now I'm doing a bunch of maintenance. And so at each step along the way, you've lost a significant part of what makes this thing compelling in the first place. And now you're just doing you're like doing a bit trying to get Alexa to work. Right. It feels cool, but it's not actually less work. No, it's more work. Right. And so you get to a point where the math of how much time am I spending to make coffee every morning just doesn't tip in Alexa's favor.

34:06And it's true with so many things. And that has always been the thing for me that it's like, yeah, I could make the good morning routine work, but it would only work half the time. And I'm going to go have to fix all the things it doesn't get right every morning. And it's just not – I'll just walk into the room and turn the light on. That works. Oh, David, you're breaking my heart. No, but it's, and it kills me too, because I want all that stuff to work. And like once a year, I go through the work of setting all this stuff up again. And then the third time in a row, it doesn't work. I'm like, ah, nevermind.

34:38And I just tear it all out of the wall again. Or it works, but there's one thing actually that you didn't, you'd forgot that you don't want it to do that one time. Like your son's sleeping and they don't have to go to school that day, but it still turns the light on in their room, you know? So, and again, that goes back to the context. You know, it needs to know more about your home and be more intelligent and not just command and control. That is actually a perfect segue into all of where this stuff is headed, which I think we're 10 years in and we're kind of at the beginning of maybe a next decade of new things on this front.

35:14We're going to take a really quick break. Will you stick around and talk to me about all that stuff too? Of course, I will be right here. All right, good. We'll be right back.

35:24Adobe Acrobat Studio. So brand new. Show me all the things PDFs can do. Do your work with ease and speed. PDF spaces is all you need. Do hours of research in an instant. With key insights from an AI assistant. Pick a template with a click. Now your Prezo looks super slick. Close that deal. Yeah, you won. Do that. Doing that. Did that. Done. Now you can do that. Do that. With Acrobat. Now you can do that. Do that with the all new Acrobat. it's time to do your best work with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio. All right, we're back. Jen Toohey's still here. Hi, Jen. Hi. I just like talking about Alexa.

36:02This is fun. This is delightful. I have been on the hill of voice assistants will change everything for a very long time, and I have mostly been wrong. So let's talk about the ways the future might prove me and you right. One day. Yeah. How long do we get? Yeah. Let's say 10 more years. I think the first decade, not so much for us. Decade number two, maybe. We're right in there. Hard maybe. So let's talk about kind of where we are at this moment, both in terms of what Alexa is and kind of what we know about where it's about to go. And I think you, I think, relatively recently got to go see some version of like the perfect like platonic ideal of an Alexa system, right?

36:49That like Amazon's fever dream of what your house might look like. Yes, I did. I went for a tour of Amazon's Smart Home Lab, which is in their Seattle headquarters. And I was excited when they suggested the idea. and they said, you know, we can show you everything we have set up and it's sort of like an idealistic, like this is what the sort of ultimate Alexa-powered ambient smart home looks like. You know, everything is connected and set up and you just need to say a few words. I was hoping for a bit more motion sensing action, like ambient action, but there was, you know, this was kind of like their ideal.

37:30So I was expecting, honestly, to be kind of blown away. Yeah, I mean, if ever it's going to feel like magic, it should be literally Amazon with infinite resources and all of the people who made this thing at its disposal should be able to make it feel like magic. They should. I'm not looking forward to where we're headed here.

37:53Yeah, I'm going to say it. It was very disappointing. Oh, no. How so? Very nice apartment. Beautiful views. Sunny day, too. Seattle. go. But it was pedestrian. You know, they had everything, you know, hundreds of devices that could work with the voice assistant, echo devices everywhere, you know, robot vacuums, ring devices, fire TVs, and then lots of third party things. But they had like Lutron Caseta lights, It said switchbot robot fingers, tons of fun gadgets. But ultimately, it was all still command and control. And, you know, as we talked about. And Amazon has said, along with in the same breath of, you know, our aspiration is a Star Trek computer.

38:45Our aspiration is an ambient smart home. a sort of a home that responds to you proactively without you having to do anything or do something very minimal, just say a few words or maybe press a button and what you want happens. And they had set up in the house different routines in each room. So there was like a watch TV routine. There was a leaving the home routine. And of course, a good morning routine, which I was excited to try out. I even got into the bed and got ready to start my day. And again, there are no motion sensors, so I had to say a command to get things going. And it did the normal stuff, turned the lights on, started the shower, which is something I've always wanted.

39:35But again, really expensive. If you've looked into Moen or Kohler's smart showers, it's not cheap. So, you know, it just didn't sort of have that ambient feel. And also, it was really slow and really laggy. And again, I'm like, guys, this is your sort of ultimate setup. And you're basically just reaffirming my feeling that this is still basically a remote control for your home, which is great. That has its use case. But it is not StarCatrap's computer and it is not an ambient smart home. I actually love that distinction. because I think one other thing you and I have talked about over the years and that I've been forever fascinated by is universal remotes, which I actually think as a gadget are sort of woefully underdeveloped and under considered.

40:27And the idea that I can just sit and hold a thing and it becomes like a magic wand for all of my gear strikes me as a much more attainable than some of the other stuff we're working on and be really cool and useful. Like I have I have six or seven remotes just for the stuff here in my basement. And in terms of like actual human utility, putting all of that into one usable device makes a lot of sense. And so I think to your point, it's not nothing to turn this into something that can go do an individual thing on your behalf, right? Having like one interface for all of that stuff, even a command at a time is not nothing.

41:02It's also nowhere near the like big ambient computing, something that can do everything for you. and a word that Amazon has used more and more over time is proactively, right? Like the idea is not just that you should be able to ask it to do it for you and it will. It should be able to do it for you. Like just the fact that you have to say good morning in order to tell it that you've woken up and to start the routine is actually a failure of the system. It should just know you've woken up and do the things for you, right? Like, and again, all that technology is there. There's these people, like, again, it costs them a billion dollars, but like you can buy the eight sleep thing that tracks your sleep.

41:39And the pieces of the puzzle are sitting there. And Alexa was supposed to be the thing that put them all together in such a way that you didn't have to. And right now we're still on the universal remote phase. Well, and to Alexa's credit, it is, if there is one thing that is more difficult to navigate than voice control, it is a universal remote. Fair, fair. There are like eight Logitech Harmony owners out there screaming. I want you to know I hear you. And I love you, but it's true. But, you know, universal remotes have their place, but there's also a reason why there are very few of them around.

42:18But what the problem with a universal remote and with Alexa as it is today is that specific nomenclature. The fact that you have to say specific words to get Alexa to do something or press a specific sequence of buttons on your universal remote. But yeah, it's that the ambient part is the intelligence. And neither of those things currently have the intelligence. And, you know, there are, that's where, that's the next step in the smart home. Whether it's Amazon that can bring that intelligence or another company, there are many, many trying. That's what we need. We need the systems that can understand context, that can understand everything that's in our home.

43:07I mean, when I spoke with Dave Limp, when they had their last event in October of 2023, he said, we are feeding all of every smart home manual ever made into Alexa to make it more intelligent so that it knows the devices in your home. That's what it needs, that knowledge. But then it also needs the intelligence to be able to act on them. For example, I have a smart faucet in my kitchen. And if I go up to it to, or I can use Alexa to have it do fun things like dispense two cups of water at 90 degrees. You know, perfect for a baby bottle. And you can set these presets. But I'll be standing in front of the faucet and I will have to say, Alexa, ask Moen to dispense two cups of water at 90 degrees.

43:58and sometimes it will say, okay, and sometimes it will say, I can't do that. Please set up your devices again, or something along those lines. And then my husband was watching me try and play with this the other day, and he said, shouldn't it just know that you're standing in front of the kitchen faucet, and when you say, I want two cups of hot water, just do it? And it should, and it could. That is a future we could have. There is enough technology just even in Echo devices and also in devices like from Apple and Google that you have in your home. There are smart speakers, things like UWB, radar.

44:38The technology is there. I mean, for God's sake, Amazon owns Ring, which makes a drone with a camera that will fly around your house. Allegedly. Fair. It allegedly will do that. It's a fair point. But yeah, like, again, and I think we should just say and then move on from the fact that, like, all of this requires a deep, like, privacy tradeoff in a way that should make people uncomfortable and is a tradeoff that we are going to need to reckon with as people. if that technology is ever going to get to what you're describing, we are going to have to make some like very conscious decisions about I want my speaker to be aware that I'm standing at the sink.

45:21And we should just leave that conversation for another time because I think that is a place where like everyone is going to have to make personal decisions about how they feel about that stuff. But that is what it requires. I do need to disinterject because we've gone in almost an hour and I haven't mentioned the M word, but this is where Matter could help. Oh, God. Well, that's the first cast.

45:44So whilst it's up to the platforms, how they implement, and my money would be on Amazon using the cloud. Gosh, not sure why, but anyway, a platform, a smart home platform using Matter can keep all of that information entirely local and use that data locally. So, but we'll put a pin in that. Yeah, we'll have many more chances to have that version of the conversation. But to your point, this is the future everyone imagines, right? I think that the really interesting point we're at right now is anyone thinking about this kind of ambient computing future thinks about it roughly the same way. The goal is the same.

46:24And we're at a moment right now where everyone thinks it's the same technology that's going to get us there. Which, again, brings us to Dave Limp a year ago, who, I don't know, I guess in retrospect, like, way pre-announced a gigantic reboot of Alexa. Am I overstating it, to put it like that? No, no. I mean, he got on stage and demoed a new, very much more conversational Alexa. That was the kind of the big show-off, was being able to talk to the voice assistant naturally, not having to constantly repeat the wake word and have it had more personality, like it was kind of joking with him. And that sort of natural conversation, which was, again, the sort of the North Star, the Star Trek computer, being able to speak naturally and have a conversation is something they've been working towards.

47:16And this demo did show that it was almost a reality. They also at that event talked about how Alexa was going to be able to do more of what we've been talking about here and sort of do more intelligent responses. One of the things is sort of multi-step routines. So you could create something just by telling Alexa a list of things you want it to accomplish, you know, more like like to a computer and have it just reel those off without you having to go into an app and set up a routine and then set up a trigger. So you don't have to spend your time programming your smart home. You just think, oh, actually, I want this to happen right now.

48:01Alexa, do it for me and it will do it. And then, you know, this is a sort of their new vision, how it's going to get there. I mean, ultimately, what I would like is something like that. I would like to be able to have Alexa follow through on the commands that I have, but also understand the context of them. So, for example, an idea I sort of came up with what I would love to be able to say, something like, Alexa, tell my son not to forget his science project, you know, set the alarm when he leaves in the morning. then unlock the back door at 4 p.m. for the plumber, lock it again at 5, and then preheat the oven at 6 o 'clock.

48:40But if I'm running late, adjust the time, you know, so you don't burn the house down. And it would need, but Amazon's going to need a lot more context to be able to do this type of thing. And this is the type of thing that we're already seeing hints of in the other ecosystems. Like that's some of what Siri may be able to do in terms of the intelligent Siri, not the smart home control, but understanding like that I'm running late. Oh, now there goes Siri. This is great. She's on it. Don't worry. I'm glad. I look forward to what she comes back with. There it is. Siri, everybody. All right, keep going.

49:20Sorry. I forgot about that one. This is great. We're leaving all of this in. This is the most, this is a real show not tell thing we're doing here. I can go with Google next. Hey, Google, you want to hype up? No, it doesn't listen. There's one right here. Nothing. Nothing. Yeah. Yeah. This is why the Alexa team is not afraid of Google and Apple. Okay. Sorry. But yeah, and I, that context aware voice assistant is the kind of, you know, the holy grail for me. That is the computer. That is the ambient technology. And, you know, So you could, you know, speaking of like the type of technology that Apple said it's bringing to Siri with a contextually aware Siri, you could imagine.

50:06And this may be something a little bit out there and might scare most people. I don't have an answer for that. Is there something else I can help with? Is that something like this? OK, so it's soccer night. I'm working in my home office. My mom is bringing the kids home and she's texted me that she's bringing a frozen pizza. So my smart assistant sees the text message, knows that it's my mom and not me, because I'm also mom, and starts preheating the oven, you know, so that the frozen pizza can go in as soon as they get home, unlocks the door at 6.30, which is when they said they were going to arrive, turns on the air purifier because it knows the oven's on.

50:49And then after we've had dinner, the robot vacuum will just automatically start a quiet, clean and mop of the kitchen. And then if someone has thought to shut the dishwasher, it will start running automatically. And then I sit down on the couch and without having to say anything or do anything, because UWB sensors in my HomePod minis or my Alexa soundbar know that we're sitting on the couch. The lights dim down, the TV turns on, and it knows the kids are there. So it starts playing something family-friendly that it knows we like watching, like, say, last night's recording of The Voice. Yes, I do like The Voice.

51:28And then at 8.30, it turns off because it knows it's bedtime. Maybe my Moen Smart Faucet, if they had one for the bath, would start running a bath for me at the right temperature, turn the lights on upstairs, play some soothing music. and I haven't had to do anything. My assistant and my home have has pulled all that together for me. I mean, is that the dream or does that slightly terrify you? I mean, both, to be honest. And I think I think that's mostly the dream. I think there are bits and pieces of that that I think the sort of perfectly proactive assistant is actually the wrong answer. Like one thing I've learned over time talking to people who work at streaming companies is that the idea of you just sit down and it plays the perfect thing for you is actually not correct.

52:20It's the Amazon thing of like, what if they could just ship you the stuff that you want? People like to shop, right? People like to browse. And even the thing that is technically the perfect thing for you to watch. David, you don't have a 13-year-old and a 16-year-old. Listen, I didn't say it's a good thing that people like to do this, but people do like to do this. And the idea of like, if you sit down, even if what you want to watch is the voice, if it just puts the voice on for you, it feels weird. And so I think there are things about like, if my house just starts drawing me a bath at bath time, there's something odd about that.

52:51But if it can chime in and be like, hey, would you like me to? Right. That starts to feel really valuable, right? So I think there's a really interesting interface question there where it's like Friday night and it's like, oh, is it movie night tonight? And you're like, yes, it is. And then it does the whole thing. whereas instead you have to come in. Right. Yeah. And when you have a personal assistant, you talk to them, right? It's not like... I know, I don't want to talk. But like if you had a human personal assistant, you would talk to them and they would ask you questions and that's a fine set of interactions.

53:22Yeah. You wouldn't have to say their name and then a series of words in the correct order, right? So I think there's a bunch of really interesting interface questions there. But with the LLM stuff that everybody is betting on right now, the thing I keep thinking about is that what it will definitely do I feel very good about the fact that large language models are going to make understanding your queries better right like we have ample evidence now that for things like speech to text and for natural language processing and text to speech LLMs are very good they're better than the systems we had before so I think the idea that I'm going to be able to say that paragraph of things that you just said to Alexa and it will understand them.

54:06I feel very good about that. But as we've seen for 10 years, that's only part of the process. And LLMs don't solve any of the other parts of the process. And I think your point about what Google and Apple can do here is really important because A, they both have access to your phone, which gives them location data. It gives them lots of information about your contacts, which is really important. All this kind of stuff. I also think Google has a big advantage because it's connected to things like your calendar and your email more intimately in a lot of ways and also has like your web search, which is very powerful.

54:39Apple gets a lot of that because if it's Google deals, like there's some weird antitrust things going on here. But Amazon doesn't have any of that and really doesn't have a path to getting any of that. Unless you feed it to it, which is an extra step on your part. Right. Sure. And I think like, do I want to give Alexa access to my Gmail is again, personal question there are probably upsides to doing that over time uh kind of like trip it forward my emails right exactly exactly but i think like i i have found myself using gemini a lot to look for information in my google stuff and that's really powerful and amazon just has none of that and so alexa has none of that and i think if i were to like galaxy brain all of the crazy gadget launches amazon has had over the years they are so desperate to put alexa in front of you at all times that you will just accidentally end up giving it all of that information.

55:33Seriously, like, and I think that's not a crazy strategy, right? To say, if you're wearing glasses that have Alexa baked in, you're going to talk to Alexa more, and thus you're going to tell it more information. You're going to have it remind you of more stuff. It might gain more information just by listening. Like, there are a lot of things it can do with that kind of ubiquity. But A, it doesn't have that. B, it's not going to anytime soon. And C, even that I don't think is enough. So I get to this point where I'm like, maybe Alexa is about to get a lot better at the thing it was already good at and not that much better at anything else.

56:05But maybe that's cynical. Well, it definitely feels like there is a big reset coming. I mean, we got the tease of the new Alexa or the remarkable Alexa as it's been reportedly referred to. in there was a big piece by the Wall Street Journal sort of talking about all the problems Amazon has had. And that was the rumor is that it's remarkable. I think I'm not sure about remarkable. I'm not a big fan of that. But anyway. Also kind of a sick burn of 10 years of Alexa. Yeah. It's like we had pedestrian Alexa and now we have remarkable. Yeah. But, you know, they have a new hardware chief, Panos Panay.

56:43Friend of the Vergecast. Friend of the Vergecast, who did not want to talk about new Alexa the last time you had him on. No, he did not. Not at all. But he did hint quite heavily that it's coming. And this year I picked up on in that conversation. And I think there is a big reset. And we haven't had a fall event this year. It's the first time in a while. So we haven't had dozens of new devices. Instead, there's been dribs and drabs of news coming out over the last few weeks that you would have totally been part of a big event. Like there's a new Outdoor Eero. Ring has finally got 24-7 recording.

57:21New Kindle. Lots of Kindles. So many Kindles. There's also more devices going away. We know that Echo Dot with Clock, RIP, that went a few months ago. Rumor has it that Echo Show 15 is on the outs. It's been out of stock for a long time. More services being killed. Alexa Together, which was their home care service, which I really, I thought was a great service. But, you know, we're seeing a big reset. We've seen Andy Jassy has been reported that he's sort of culling the devices and services division. But I'm hoping that this is all in a sort of streamlined effort. For what I said at the beginning of the conversation is that they had too much emphasis on gadgets and gizmos and not enough on the core value proposition of what the assistant can offer.

58:11And trimming the cruff and hopefully bringing everything together in a much more focused, usable way with a better UI, better voice interface powered by LLMs. I think I know they have their own Alexa LLM, but there's been reports that they're also going to be using, I think, is it Claude? So there's lots going on. It's just a question of are they going to get it right? Is it going to be a new hardware shift, which would be a tough sell because there's a lot of Echoes out there. But also, I kind of feel like we need it. Like the Echo has sort of become, you know, a throwaway gadget. You know, I saw so many reports in my research of people like, well, I have three or four Echo dots in cupboards and drawers and just don't use them because they're commoditized, cheap, and you can buy them for$18.

59:10And there's no real expectation of anything great coming out of a cheap piece of hardware on your table. You know, it's definitely a moment where I think they have the opportunity to do something pretty exciting, just like they did 10 years ago when they launched Alexa on November 6, 2014. But are we going to get it? Do you think Amazon is right to still call it Alexa? I think a question we've been asking a lot is, are the old ways of thinking about these voice assistants the right way to think about the next wave of them? And Google is basically killing Google Assistant in favor of Gemini. Apple still seems to be using Siri, but Apple Intelligence is very much the sort of bigger umbrella brand than Siri is at this point.

1:00:02Amazon appears to still be all the way bought into Alexa as the thing and is very much going to sort of bake new technology into all of the existing stuff rather than just kind of wiping the slate and starting over. Do you think that's the right call? Yeah. So from talking to all three people at all three companies about this, it sounds like the technology, there's a real disconnect between what the current voice assistants can do and what the LLMs can do. And the LLMs cannot do a lot of what the current voice assistants can do. Like I heard rumors from one company that they basically were having to come, you know, rebuild everything they had done for their previous voice assistant for their new LLM.

1:00:46And it's like, why are we doing this? This, you know, reinventing the wheel. So it feels to me like a meshing or a merging of the two makes the most sense. But again, not an engineer. This may be a technical impossibility. There may be too much technical baggage buried underneath Alexa and Siri and Google's assistant that just will not mesh with the future pathway. But I think we need to keep the names. We do not need new names. That's right. That seems like a non-starter to me. And especially for Amazon. I mean, they spent a decade building a very recognizable brand that they constantly tell me people love.

1:01:23Like, people love their Alexa. I think that's true. I think people think Siri sucks and Alexa is great. Limited but great. And Google's smarter. Yeah, Google Assistant is kind of, it's like the nerdy weird kid in the corner, right? That it's like, it's very cool, but no one really talks about it. But it does some impressive stuff. But I do think it's true that I think you could have made the case that walking away from Siri would have been a smart move for Apple. Yes. Just given the baggage of Siri. I don't think Alexa has that baggage. I think people mostly have settled into this thing is for music and timers, but like you said, it costs$18, so who cares?

1:02:00And now if Amazon can say, oh, this thing that you bought now has incredible new capabilities, that's really powerful. I, it remains to be seen whether that is the case. And I think with a lot of LLMs, we continue to be sold a bill of goods that is not based in reality in a lot of ways. But also, I tend to think you're right. I could imagine a world in which Amazon is like, here's a whole new brand, we're changing everything. But also like, these things are everywhere. they're pretty simple hardware and it's all in the cloud anyway so like if they can just suddenly upgrade everyone's speakers in some massive way that becomes that becomes pretty powerful well my uh original echo which is in my husband's garage according to dave limp at the event last year will be updated to support the new alexa it might have another 10 years in it it might yeah i mean that's pretty impressive and that's that's a whole infrastructure that i don't see Amazon getting rid of.

1:02:56And yeah, I think that's the right move. Make Alexa smarter. And the capabilities and the possibilities just get really interesting. I'm excited to see what they can do. I just want them to hurry up and do it. You and me and everybody at this point. But here's what we're going to do. You're going to have to come back when they launch it, which as far as we know, might be in like the next couple of weeks. Yeah. But we're both going to review whatever the new Alexa is on the very first Echo. I'm going to find mine. It's somewhere. And we're going to talk about it. We're going to have 10-year-old hardware with brand new software.

1:03:29And we're going to see if magic has really happened. That sounds like a good plan. Awesome. All right, Jen, thank you as always. Again, I suspect we will see you again very soon. Sounds good. Thanks. See ya. Bye. All right, we got to take one more break. And then we're going to come back and take a question from the VertiCast hotline. We'll be right back.

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1:04:25All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. We love all of your questions. Please keep sending them. Keep calling in. Hearing from you is the absolute best. We got a bunch more episodes to do this year. Cannot wait for your hotline questions. Love everything that everybody's been sending. Thank you, as always. This week, we have both a question and a product idea about AirPods. Let's hear it. Hey, VertCast. This is Kyle calling in from Texas, and I had a question for y 'all. I was listening to your episode on the new hearing aid updates to Apple's AirPods.

1:05:04And while the new update sounds exciting, and I'm looking forward to seeing how people benefit from the testing capabilities and hearing aid functionality, your discussion got me thinking. Don't kill me, but I sometimes do the same thing that y 'all mentioned, where if I'm ordering something, I just take one of them out. And in most social settings nowadays, that seems to pretty consistently communicate that you're listening to the other person, especially since nearly all headphones pause whatever you're listening to. But since that doesn't work for those using AirPods as hearing aids, I had an idea.

1:05:34What if Apple added LEDs to their headphones? This would high-key be copying Samsung's new models, but even though it would take some time for everyone to learn, it might allow you to tell if someone else wearing AirPods can hear you speaking to them. It would kind of be like the way Apple tried to have eyesight on the Vision Pro communicate where the user is paying attention, but hopefully not in a way that's deeply in the uncanny valley. I thought it was a fun idea, but maybe we'll instead just get used to people wearing headphones in public. But I was really interested to hear if y 'all thought it might work.

1:06:08Thanks again so much for taking my call. Love the show. Bye. Okay, I shared this call for two reasons. One, because I actually think it's an awesome idea. And I think the idea of putting some kind of notification LED on AirPods to signal really whatever you want it to signal, but in this case, it would be to signal that they're in hearing aid mode, actually fits with what we're seeing from a lot of technology right now, right? He mentioned the face stuff on the Vision Pro. But to me, this sounds more like what you see on the latest run of smart glasses. Probably the easiest example is the Ray-Ban meta smart glasses, where they actually have a light that says, essentially, you're being recorded.

1:06:50And I think that stuff is still pretty new, and we're still figuring it out. And I mean, you rewind back to Google Glass and the idea of there being a light suggesting that you're being recorded didn't actually help anybody and just made everything feel gross and bad and didn't solve a lot of problems. But I think we're at a point now where those kinds of things can be communicated, right? Where you're saying, okay, this is listening to you in some way. And I actually think the idea of using an LED to mean essentially you are being captured by my device in some meaningful way kind of works, right?

1:07:24Whether it's the camera is on and I can see you and I'm taking video of you or my headphones are capturing what you're saying and feeding it to me. Either one of those, if you pull it all the way down, is just you are being captured in some way. And I think if that's all we need these LEDs to signify, that can really work. It'll take some marketing work to get people to understand that and it'll take some time for it to sort of societally catch on. but I would actually rather land in that place than just pure constant acceptance of headphones because if we get to the point where you're wearing headphones and I still assume that I can talk to you I think that's bad and I think that's wrong frankly in a lot of ways headphones as a signal of leave me alone are actually really powerful and valuable and also it's just true that a lot of the times when you're wearing headphones you can't hear other people so having a much more more aggressive signal that says, I can hear you.

1:08:20I am capturing you in some way works for me. So I think that's a great idea. I hope Apple does something like it. I think we might be giving Samsung a little too much credit. Samsung just like put LEDs on the Galaxy Buds 3 Pro that don't really do anything. I think they light up when you turn on the find my feature, which like, sure, but they can't show battery. They don't show when they're, you know, in various modes. There are a bunch of things they could do there. I think the lights actually look good. In Samsung's case, they're mostly just aesthetic, but it's proof that you could do something like this.

1:08:55And I think that's very compelling. So I'm in favor of this idea 100%. I hope Apple does it. But the other reason I share this is because we get a lot of feedback from people when Chris Welch and I talked about the hearing aid mode on the AirPods. And especially when we talked about the societal shift that is coming for headphones. And I think I've been pretty blase about it to a certain extent, right? Like I look at my nephews who are both teenagers. They most of the time just have one AirPod in and I don't really think anything of it. But then I talked to lots of other people who view that as rude and off-putting and deliberately removing yourself from a social situation in some way.

1:09:35I'm confident they don't see it that way, but it might be that way anyway. So I think that piece of it is complicated, and it's not going to get easier. But if we want these devices to be these kinds of always-on augmented reality devices that are genuinely useful for people's health, but also more and more useful just in day-to-day life for people, that is going to require these huge societal changes. So either we get, you know, the LEDs, or we're going to have to figure out the right and wrong ways to wear headphones. And I just want to know what everybody thinks about that. This is a thing we've gotten a lot of feedback about.

1:10:14I'd like to hear your thoughts too. How should we think about headphones in the real world, especially as headphones become more than just music devices, as they become something that actually augments your ability to go through your life while also being a way to listen to music and TikTok. How do we navigate that? What is the right answer for headphones? Should we enter a world where we're all wearing headphones all the time and we just kind of figure it out? Should headphones just be outlawed forever and things that are hearing aids should look like hearing aids? Is there an interesting answer somewhere in between, both culturally and in product?

1:10:50I want to hear all your feedback. This has turned out to be a much bigger, more interesting thing than I expected. So please hit us up. I want to hear everything. We're going to keep talking about this in more and more ways in the coming months because I think this matters in some pretty big ways. All right. That is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who was on the show. Thank you for listening. Thank you for calling the hotline. Thank you for being part of this with us. There's lots more about everything we talked about, including this like mini package of stories we did about the legacy and future of Alexa at theverge.com.

1:11:20I'll link to all of it in the show notes. But as always, read theverge.com. It's a big week this week. Go vote if you haven't voted yet. And if you're listening to this on Tuesday in the United States, go vote. Read our election package. Lots of great stories in there. Read the endorsement. Go vote. Best of luck to everybody out there. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other Alexa devices you would like to set off inside of my house, you can always email us at vergecastatheverge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. We love hearing from you. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez.

1:11:52The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neil and I will be back on Friday to talk about, honestly, I couldn't even guess at this point because it's an election week. And I suspect we'll be talking about that, plus some other product news, plus a bunch of Apple stuff that's shipping this week. Lots to do. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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