10. Alexa+ and Google Gemini get off to slow starts
Ben Patterson/Foundry
2025 was supposed to be the year when AI for the smart home arrived with a bang. Instead, it was the year when AI tip-toed into the smart home market, ever so slowly and oh-so careful to avoid slip-ups.
Amazon was first out of the gates, unveiling Alexa+ (for the second time) in February, while Google waited until October before revealing the details of its Gemini for Home effort. The rollouts have been conspicuously cautious; it took months before early access to Alexa+ became widely available, while Google only recently stepped up the pace of its Gemini for Home invites.
Both Amazon and Google have ambitious plans for their respective generative AI smart home helpers, and if you ask them, they’ll say Alexa+ and Gemini are already in millions of homes, packed with features that take smart home monitoring and automation to the next level, yada yada.
The truth is that smart home users have greeted Alexa+ and Gemini at Home with ambivalence, with a few marveling at the AI-powered changes in their assistants while others have grumbled about missing features (“Continued Conversation,” anyone?) or head-scratching answers to smart home queries.
Many of Amazon’s and Google’s most exciting AI smart home promises have yet to materialize; Alexa+’s agentic shopping abilities are still mainly confined to Amazon.com, for example, while the upcoming Google Home Speaker with Gemini Live capabilities won’t arrive until next spring. And there have been plenty of bumps along the way; getting Alexa+ to buy a movie ticket or score a dinner reservation is a hit-or-miss proposition, while Gemini security-cam video descriptions are prone to occasional hallucinations.
Am I saying that Alexa+ and Gemini at Home are total failures? No—like other recent smart home innovations that have suffered from rocky rollouts (I’m looking at you, Matter), it’s still early days, and I expect the pace of new features to accelerate in the coming year.
But did Alexa+ and Gemini at Home revolutionize the smart home in 2025? Not really, no.
