The Great Promise of AI? Not Hardly

In Big Tech's rush to add AI to everything, they are breaking a lot of things. From The Verge, we get an update on Smart Homes. 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.

This morning, I asked my Alexa-enabled Bosch coffee machine 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.

It’s 2025, and AI still can’t reliably control my smart home. I’m beginning to wonder if it ever will.

The promise of AI in the Smart Home, was that it was going to make it easier to set things up, and easier for people to get things done, like run that "Make the coffee" routine. It hasn't worked out that way.

Click thru for the details of how Amazon made things worse with AI. The old systems were dependent on you using precise vocabulary, but it could actually do things.

Hat tip to Pixy Misa at Ambient Irony and Daily News Stuff 24 December 2025: Zero Shopping Days Edition

How AI broke the smart home in 2025. (The Verge) (archive site)

When all you have is an LLM, everything looks like a chat room.

Contrary to what they seem to believe in C-suites across corporate America, AI is not the answer to everything.

You know what this reminds me of?

Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is Bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via Alexa! I love the future!

Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.