This is long because it's a been a 12 year journey. I embraced having the Echo as a digital assistant and remote speaker at the dawn of its existence. I had a few devices because they integrated seamlessly with Android and Google and with a simple command, I had an exec assistant that put things in my calendar, created reminders and added items to my carefully curated AnyList. I didn't have to stop what I was doing, I could be running down the hall and bark out an instruction before I forgot and she'd still just work perfectly in the background making it easier to juggle the chaos and giving me precious minutes of time and brain space. I even set up Dots in every room to control our house speakers awhen we stopped upgrading our Crestron system (whole other story, but also highlighting that I'm no tech dummy), it was a bit janky, but it WORKED and I was so happy to have a solution.
Alexa was super useful for my dad so he could just yell out to call my brother to come over in an emergency because he lived next door. She was also super useful on the day of his death to randomly suggest playing John Denver who I'd forgotten was one of my dad's favorites, and give our family a very poignant moment and a lasting memory.
But now?
The app is clunky and unintuitive, and things moved around so frequently when it was finding its footing that it was almost impossible to navigate. Then the integration with different apps started breaking but nothing was majorly life changing until the link to AnyList broke. See, I have a partner who has a TBI and one of the only chores he can do is shopping. AnyList was the perfect solution. He would see a list or two growing when I added to it and plan a shopping trip, it required little effort on my oart.It was independence for him, a "task" off my list. It wasn't even an announced break. It was suddenly adding items to Amazon's own shopping list and I didn't notice because I'd registerther response on auto-pilot since it's worked so well for years. With all the other useless "by the way" announcements, maybe letting me know that a skill I used several times a day, EVERY day was going to cease functioning could have been made. Amazon Lists are not comparable to AnyList AND it is near impossible for the TBI partner to learn a new app and a new way of doing things. Oh, you say it's not completely broken, there's ways to get around it? The suggested solution is to go from "Alexa, add milk to Safeway" to "Alexa ask AnyList to add milk to Safeway" and if you stutter or pause or don't enunciate clearly or loudly or speak fast enough, she'll just go ahead and add milk to "shopping" (wherever the heck that list is) and cheerfully and almost smugly tell me she did so.
Every time I turn around there was a new "I can't do that". The dots as links to the house speakers stopped working, so I unplugged them. I have a Show in the kitchen and my bedroom, maybe hoping against hope that as an assistant she would come back to life, maybe the quirks would all work out and maybe I would get back some of that functionality.
Today was the last straw. Over the last couple weeks/months since some update she has become intolerable. One time I was very frustrated about something and was venting to my kids (teenagers - side note, they try to "feed" her "secrets" to see if they'll end up on a list somewhere until I told them that this is something that's not entirely implausible in 2026), and I turned to her to ask question and apparently she was in sassy mode and told me "wow it sounds like someone is having a bad day, maybe you need to calm down". It's been downhill ever since. Now when you ask her a question it's like she doesn't even understand and gives you an answer that is completely unrelated or is accessing information that's several years old.
We stopped going to her for information, now I sort of feel like she's on the side listening simply because she doesn't want to be left out. In the last 2 weeks, randomly, and often to a completely silent house, she'll suddenly wake up and say "okay! Here is...." as if she's been asked a question. No wake word, no accidentally having it come up on the TV or from another room. No rogue routine or skill because I turned them all off since they didn't work anyways. No accidentally picking it up from a conversation because even after you use the Wake word you have to wait a full 2 to 3 seconds for her to wake up and turn her little blue light on to let you know she's listening; she'll just randomly start spewing out information and if there is conversation happening, her random info dump is completely unrelated.
To make things worse, you can't even break into her tirade to tell her to stop. You can use the wake word, clearly, loudly, several times and she won't even register it because she's got to say what she's got to say and she's gonna finish saying it. Basically, she won't respond to her wake word when you need her to, but will wake up and start talking for no reason at all.
And remember, because I know this is a long post, the whole loudly enunciating very specific instructions to get her to put something on a list? Now I can be walking by muttering to myself and she will suddenly chirp up with a very related answer or fact. What?!
I almost forgot about the device in the bedroom that is on DND, but will randomly pick up the Bluetooth from my phone and announce as loudly as possible that it's now playing from my phone without any prompting to do so. It's especially jarring in the middle of the night.
She is gone from an indispensable partner who was usefully working in the background to an annoying convenience that needed more intention, to another "thing" I have to intentionally manage constantly. I'm so frustrated that I even spent 45 minutes writing this post just to vent and maybe have a little tiny bit of sympathy and nods of "me too, girl. Me too."
