A decade ago, Alexa was the future. Today, when we talk about conversational and chatbots, we mentioned ChatgptClaude, Grok or Gemini. Traditional voice assistants (I also look at you, Siri) have become something that simply exists, such as microwave: limitedly useful, but forgotten, cornered.
Amazon has just presented four new echo devices:
- Echo Dot Max with serious three times more powerful.
- Echo Studio redesigned.
- Echo Show 8 and 11 with screens of more than one million pixels and 13 MP cameras.
Yes, but. The improvements are real and measurable. The problem is that many fewer people are paying attention to ten years ago. Alexa has gone from being a revolutionary promise to a kitchen stopwatch with voice and music. We ask songs, we put alarms, little more. The narrative was exhausted.
The context. The voice assistant industry It has been stagnant for years in the same basic functionalities. Meanwhile, Chatgpt has demonstrated what a real conversational means: maintain context, reason, surprise. Users already know that there is something better, even if they don’t have it in their living room.
Amazon promises that these devices “feel the bases” to Alexa+its assistant with generative. In Spain there is still no arrival date for those advanced functions. It is the usual promise: Wait, the best is yet to come.
The big question. Can an improved spherical speaker change habits that we carry dragging a decade?
- The factor in form is the same.
- The activation gesture, identical.
- The user’s expectation about what Alexa does.
Between the lines. Amazon does not need only more powerful or microphones chips that better detect the activation word. We need to stop seeing Alexa as another appliance and imagine it again as something that can change how we live. That is not fixed with deeper serious.
The battle is no longer against Google Home or Siri. It is against the indifference of users who learned years ago what they can expect from a voice assistant and stopped waiting for more. Amazon has the hardware. He lacks the reason for us.
In Xataka | The announcement of the new Alexa hides an awkward truth: the silent sunset of the Solo-Voz interface
Outstanding image | Xataka
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