How AI broke the smart home in 2025

This morning, I asked my Alexa-enabled Bosch coffee machin e to make me a coffee. Instead of running my routine , it told me it couldn’t do that. Ever since I upgraded to Alexa Plus, Amazon’s generative-AI-powered voice assistant, it has failed to reliably run my coffee routine, coming up with a different excuse almost every time I ask. How AI broke the smart home in 2025 The arrival of generative AI assistants in our smart homes held such promise; instead, they struggle to turn on the lights. If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. It’s 2025, and AI still can’t reliably control my smart home. I’m beginning to wonder if it ever will. The potential for generative AI and large language models to take the complexity out of the smart home, making it easier to set up, use, and manage connected devices, is compelling. So is the promise of a “ new intelligence layer ” that could unlock a proactive, ambient home. But this year has shown me that we are a long way from any of that. Instead, our reliable but limited voice assistants have been replaced with “smarter” versions that, while better conversationalists, can’t consistently do basic tasks like operating appliances and turning on the lights. I want to know why. This wasn’t the future we were promised. It was back in 2023, during an interview with Dave Limp , that I first became intrigued by the possibilities of generative AI and large language models for improving the smart home experience. Limp, then the head of Amazon’s Devices & Services division that oversees Alexa, was describing the capabilities of the new Alexa they were soon to launch (spoiler alert: it wasn’t soon ). Along with a more conversational assistant that could actually understand what you said no matter how you said it, what stood out to me was the promise that this new Alexa could use its knowledge of the devices in your smart home, combined with the hundreds of APIs they plugged into it, to give the assistant the context it needed to make your smart home easier to use. From setting up devices to controlling them, unlocking all their features, and managing how they can interact with other devices, a smarter smart home assistant seemed to hold the potential to not only make it easier for enthusiasts to manage their gadgets but also make it easier for everyone to enjoy the benefits of the smart home. Fast-forward three years, and the most useful smart home AI upgrade we have is AI-powered descriptions for security camera notifications . It’s handy, but it’s hardly the sea change I had hoped for. It’s not that these new smart home assistants are a complete failure. There’s a lot I like about Alexa Plus; I even named it as my smart home software pick of the year . It is more conversational, understands natural language , and can answer...

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