We’ve been an Amazon Alexa family since the company started releasing products, but Amazon’s announcement of a new and improved Alexa — named Alexa+ — has us questioning how much longer we want to be surrounded by our various Alexa devices. We’re already Amazon Prime subscribers, so it’s not like it will cost us anything more, but I also don’t like being forced to upgrade to a product I don’t think is an actual upgrade. (The new Alexa will cost $20 per month for non-Prime subscribers and be free for those with Prime. The fact that Prime is only $15 per month shows that Alexa+ is mainly a way to drive Prime subscriptions.)
For a brief rundown, the new Alexa+ should be easier and faster to interact with, it will integrate with “tens of thousands of services and devices you use in your daily life,” Alexa Routines can be created by voice instead of only in the app, and will continue to control devices as it has for years. Alexa+ will also be able to use AI to create songs in the moment with Suno — killing the souls of musicians everywhere, mine included, little by little.
Currently throughout our home there are multiple Amazon devices, including an Echo smart speaker in our living room, an Echo Spot in our bedroom, two Echo Dots, and an Echo Show 15. We use almost all of them regularly, either for controlling music playback (both when we’re home and when we go out so the dogs have something to listen to), turning on and off the lights and AC (hello, Los Angeles heat), and making announcements throughout the home for our son to come to dinner or to say something silly and make him laugh.
We have a bedtime routine set up for our son that we’ve been using since he was born that begins a specific playlist my wife curated, turns his lights to a set brightness and color, and starts a projector that displays an ever-changing starfield on his ceiling. Routine is a comfort to him, and it’s one of the longest-running routines we have. Routines are used in our home theater setup to turn on devices, adjust lightning, and change color temperature depending on if we’re watching movies and TV or starting a workout routine through Les Mills or Apple Fitness+. Using home control and automation has been baked in to our everyday activities.
The thing is, when it comes to smart home control and automation, there are three main choices: Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Apple HomeKit. It’s not like any of them don’t use AI, Amazon is just finally catching up to Google’s Gemini and Apple’s Siri, after its big Apple Intelligence push (a silly play on the A.I. acronym, sorry Apple) last year. They also all collect information from our lives every waking (and sleeping) second. So it’s a case of choosing the lesser of the three evils, and in our case, the choice is Apple.
Apple is the lesser of three evils
Apple might be harvesting our data as much as the rest of Silicon Valley, but at least it’s keeping it (mostly) to themselves. Within Apple’s legal privacy policy, it says “Apple does not share personal data with third parties for their own marketing purposes.” It also still “may share personal data with Apple-affiliated companies, service providers who act on our behalf, our partners, developers, and publishers, or others at your direction.” This could include the companies that are storing data for Apple, services such as Apple Card and Apple Cash, or from subscriptions to third-party apps you use from the Apple Store. Far from perfect, but we’re at a point in this timeline where, short of completely unplugging from the world (which is not a viable solution in my line of work), we mitigate the collection of our data as best as we can.
In addition to the not-quite-as-bad-as-Amazon-and-Google data sharing policy, we’re already pretty well established in the Apple ecosystem — maybe even more so than we are in Amazon. And that existing integration means a less painful transition from one ecosystem to the other. Our iPhones (my wife and I each have one), our Apple Watches (my wife and son each have one), our iPads (my son and I each have one), and our HomePods can all be used to access and control the system we set up.
The move from Alexa to Siri
For anyone considering the switch from Amazon to Apple, there are some minor roadblocks. Because Apple is protective over its ecosystem, there are fewer products that can be connected via HomeKit. It should come as no surprise that Amazon Smart Plugs won’t work, but other third-party options, especially if they’re a few years old, might not work. (The Wemo smart plugs we have unfortunately fall in the unsupported category.)
To alleviate that, there’s an app called Homebridge for integrating devices that are not supported by HomeKit, including the Amazon family of devices like Ring doorbells. Great, right? Well, if security is a major concern, not so much. Homebridge is open source, and any app integrations are created by the community. If you know coding, you could check the code yourself to make sure it’s safe, or you could make sure to only get apps that have been downloaded many times. Common sense when it comes to things like this goes a long way. I haven’t yet used Homebridge, though, so I can’t give it an endorsement yet.
As we transition, we’ll update devices that don’t integrate with HomeKit with versions that do. Lutron, the lighting control company long loved by home theater enthusiasts, has plug and dimmer options. While they’re more expensive than the Wemo we have, home theater colleagues have said they integrate incredibly well and are very easy to use.
Has the Amazon news today made everyone ready to leave Alexa? Certainly not. Our own Simon Cohen is cautiously excited about the potential improvements for Alexa. For me, though, this was the final push I needed to migrate away and if you share my concerns, perhaps you should explore the same.
