Smart speakers are stuck in limbo. Can AI finally make them truly smart for your home?

Amazon’s new Echo Show 8 arrived earlier this year looking like a familiar promise wrapped in a slightly sleeker frame. A better display, improved audio, a new chip, and a custom sensor suite for new ambient experiences—all welcome upgrades.

However, its headline feature, Alexa+, the “generative‑AI” reboot of Amazon’s assistant, is missing in action for Indian users. The hardware supports it; the location does not. This, essentially, sums up the state of smart speakers in 2026.

Amazon Echo devices are aspirational, giftable (they pull in significant numbers from corporate gifting as well, an analyst tells me), and—for families with kids—a surprisingly sticky part of the living room. But the category itself is in a strange limbo.

The first wave of voice assistants promised a future where we would talk to our homes as naturally as we talk to each other. Instead, we got a decade of reminders, timers, weather updates, and the occasional Spotify playlist. Now, with artificial intelligence reshaping every corner of consumer tech, the smart speaker is poised for a reboot.

Where is the software?

Amazon remains the only company still treating smart speakers as a living, breathing product category.

The new Echo Show 8—the fourth‑generation model that just launched in India—is a proof that Amazon hasn’t lost interest. If anything, the software team waits for the green light to bring Alexa+ to more markets. That’s after the company missed several deadlines to introduce Alexa+ in the first place, even as AI-powered chatbots like Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot generated considerable interest and mass adoption.

Having spent time with the new Echo Show 8, the contrast between the hardware ambition and the software reality becomes even sharper. The device itself is genuinely improved: the new industrial design feels more premium, the thin bezels maximise the displays’ viewing area, the spatial audio is fuller and more room‑filling, and the upgraded 13‑megapixel camera finally makes video calls feel less like a grainy afterthought.

The custom-designed AZ3 Pro chip inside is clearly built for heavier workloads—the kind that Alexa+ will eventually demand—and the new edge‑processing capabilities hint at a future where more tasks happen locally rather than in the cloud. The chip also packs in “Omnisense”, a custom sensor platform designed for enabling ambient AI experiences.

But all of that potential sits behind the same Alexa experience that we’ve known for years. The assistant still struggles with conversational flow, still misfires on contextual queries, and still feels like a system optimised for commands rather than a dialogue. When you use the Echo Show 8 today, you can sense the gap between what a “smart device” in 2026 can do and what it’s currently allowed to do.

Maybe Alexa+ is the very thing that would make the Echo Show 8 feel like a next‑generation product. It promises more natural conversations, the ability to understand layered requests, and a more proactive, personalised assistant. It’s a future‑ready device stuck in a present‑day assistant. The Echo Show 8 clearly has room to grow, but Indian buyers won’t get to tap into any of it for now.

That said, Amazon continues to sell Echo devices in India in meaningful numbers. I’ve got one in each room of our apartment, including the washroom for the shower-along playlist, of course. According to IDC, the smart speaker market has been in a limbo for a while now, but the category witnessed 86% year-on-year growth in 2025 thanks to a renewed impetus by Amazon. The company leads the category with an over 90% of the market share.

The reasons are surprisingly straightforward. In a lot of urban households, you’d find an Echo speaker sitting somewhere—the thing you impulsively buy during a sale, the thing you gift to a family member, the thing kids use to ask for jokes and take quizzes on. And for many households, the assistant’s core use cases haven’t evolved much anyway: music, timers, weather, and controlling a few smart home devices they bought along the way.

“In India, the smart speaker has been the primary anchor device for the smart home ecosystem,” says Debasish Jana, an analyst for the smart home devices category at IDC. The new Echo Show 8, even without Alexa+, is competent and familiar.

My eight-year-old loves the older Amazon Echo in his room. Because he doesn’t have a smartphone on him or access to a PC all the time, Alexa is his go to “person” to ask about current events and match results, weather, and all the trivia a curious child wants on an everyday basis. Plus, multiple word meanings all day!

But as a reviewer, it’s hard to ignore the sense that the device is idling in neutral, waiting for the software that will finally let it stretch its legs. Until Alexa+ arrives—and Amazon has offered no timeline for the same —Indian users will end up upgrading to better Echo devices, without experiencing the benefits.

The missing options

Google’s smart speaker strategy has been a study in contradictions. After years of neglecting its Nest hardware lineup, the company quietly stopped releasing new speakers and displays. Third‑party Google Assistant devices from Lenovo and Xiaomi never gained traction, and then Google Assistant itself stagnated.

Then, in late 2025, Google flipped the switch: Gemini for Home began rolling out, replacing Google Assistant on eligible Nest speakers and displays in the US and Canada.

This wasn’t a minor update. Gemini fundamentally changes how Google’s home devices work, enabling natural conversations, contextual understanding, and complex multi‑step requests. It’s the kind of upgrade that makes the old Assistant feel instantly obsolete.

Older Nest devices are receiving the Gemini upgrade (requires subscription, of course). That’s actually in sharp contrast to the broader consumer‑electronics trend of nudging users toward new hardware, but this may be the case because Google don’t have new hardware to sell. The company’s recent announcements of new Nest Cams and a new Google Home Speaker for 2026 suggest a renewed interest in the category, but timelines for India are anybody’s guess.

If Google does return with Gemini‑powered hardware, it could re‑energize a market that once saw the Google Home Mini as the default entry‑level smart speaker. Plus, the wide adoption of Gemini on Android smartphones and across Google services will give it a definite impetus that the category needs.

Finally, there’s Apple, and that company’s smart speaker journey has been the most turbulent. The original HomePod, launched in 2018, was discontinued in 2021 after lukewarm sales and persistent criticism of Siri’s limitations. The HomePod mini, introduced in 2020, became Apple’s primary smart speaker, but it clearly needs a refresh.

Apple’s challenge has always been Siri. While the company excels at hardware and ecosystem integration, its voice assistant has lagged behind Alexa and Google Assistant in capability. And in the AI era, the limitations of Apple Intelligence and the company’s multiple missteps in that direction haven’t helped. Plus, Apple has not yet articulated a clear vision for the smart home in the generative‑AI era.

Waiting for the second act

The smart speaker boom of the late 2010s was driven by novelty and convenience. But the category hit a ceiling for several reasons. Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri plateaued. Their conversational abilities didn’t improve meaningfully, and users learned to work around their limitations rather than expect better. Additionally, smart home devices in India remain expensive and inconsistent. Most households never moved beyond a couple of bulbs and a smart plug.

And, of course, with better on‑device AI and faster processing, many users simply prefer talking to their phones and get access to far better capabilities. Sonam Chopra, a management executive assistant at a multinational organization, says that her Amazon Echo is now just a living room showpiece. “My six-year-old still asks Alexa to play songs and occasionally some trivia, but my husband or I haven’t used it in a long time. A “hey Google” query on my phone works better.”

But this arrival of generative AI has also reopened the smart speaker conversation. Alexa+, Gemini, and Apple Intelligence represent a shift from command‑based assistants to conversational, context‑aware agents. This reset could finally unlock the potential that smart speakers have been hinting at for a decade.

The first wave gave us convenience. The second wave, powered by generative AI, could give us something closer to a more competent household assistant.

Abhishek Baxi is a New Delhi-based tech writer.