After about a decade in the making, new voice assistants from Amazon and Google are finally here, and while a lot has changed in the time since they were first released, the new boss, so to speak, feels the same as the old boss—a little bit of hearing.

This week, Amazon launched Alexa+the company’s chatbot-powered sequel to regular, old Alexa. That means everyone with compatible Echo speakers can switch to Amazon’s new voice assistant, which is now embedded in a large-scale language model (LLM) similar to that used by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s a long road in early access that will last about a year, which you’d think would help improve the final results, but so far, the reactions have been… poor.

Comments on Reddit flooded with complaints of slow response times, subpar accuracyand DISAPPOINTMENT with the overall user experience. In other words, the same complaints that plagued voice assistants before the big integration of generative AI. While I haven’t had a chance to try Alexa+ myself, tech reviewers like our peers The Verge Gave it a spin, and… yeah, not so good.

As deflating as that is, Alexa+ and its anticlimax are no exception—as if it were the rule. Google also recently launched its new AI-infused voice assistant in full, and the results are also short on fireworks. I used it Gemini for Home (Google’s next-generation voice assistant) for a few months now and the collective lack of enthusiasm can be proven.

While Gemini for Home may have a more natural voice and way of speaking, the performance is almost the same and sometimes worse than before. An important minor quibble is that Gemini for Home takes longer to process orders than the previous version. That’s fine if it’s more accurate and better at doing what you want, but in my experience, that’s not always the case. Like Alexa +, Gemini for Home sometimes gets confused, overthinks, or doesn’t really understand what you want — all major problems with previous versions of voice assistants.

there the others perks, like telling Gemini for Home to do multiple things with one command, but I’d be lying if I said those perks materially change the home/voice assistant experience the way Google predicted.

What I want to say is that today, the voice assistants of the next generation feel like a little. I say “now” because there’s always room for improvement—perhaps a technological breakthrough will lead to a new way to marry voice assistants and LLMs, ultimately making them feel like a significant upgrade. Who knows? If I said I was optimistic about that prospect, I’d be lying, though. One thing that has eroded my confidence is the only major voice assistant I haven’t mentioned so far: Siri.

If one thing is clear AI Siriso making it do all the things Apple wants it to do is more difficult than the company expected. While a new Siri was announced in 2024, Apple has yet to release the full capabilities of its voice assistant, delaying its launch due to performance concerns and readiness to operate on a mass scale. Apple will finally join the ranks of Alexa + and Gemini soon—possibly this spring—but for now, it stands as a reminder that this whole voice assistant thing is harder than it looks. Even if it’s coming soon, it’s worth remembering that Gemini helps power the new voice assistant thanks to a deal struck by Google and Apple in January.

And until someone cracks the code, we’re left with LLM-powered voice assistants that look a lot like non-LLM-powered voice assistants, and someone tells me that not what Google, Amazon, and Apple are going for. Better drink hot tea with honey, people, because you’ll be endlessly yelling at your smart speakers for the foreseeable future.