The rollout of Alexa+ has been a disaster, raising questions about whether rushing AI assistants to market is worth it. Amazon's conversational AI, first announced with much fanfare last February, has faced multiple delays and a botched launch. After a soft August release with missing features and reliability problems, the full US launch finally happened just a month ago.

Wired's Rhys Rogers spent a month testing Alexa+ on his Echo Show 15 and found it barely functional. The assistant struggles with basic commands, requiring users to guess the exact phrase combinations it understands. Rogers describes it as "maneuvering like an unpredictable toddler smashing around" and compares interactions to "a synthetic bridge troll haranguing me." This mirrors complaints about the original Alexa from 2018, which also failed unless users memorized specific skill phrases.

Meanwhile, Apple's Siri upgrade faces its own delays, with reports suggesting it might launch alongside the iPhone 18 rather than the iPhone 16 as initially promoted. Given Alexa+'s struggles, the extra development time for Siri might actually benefit users. The comparison suggests that patience with Apple's timeline could be justified when the alternative is a frustrating, half-baked AI experience that fails to deliver on its conversational promises.