Editorial illustration for Siri Struggles to Keep Pace as AI Transforms Smart Home Landscape in 2025
AI Assistants Falter: Smart Home Revolution Stalls in 2025
Apple's Siri remains a decade old as AI troubles smart homes in 2025
The smart home is broken. Blame the "upgrade." Ask Amazon's Alexa or Google Assistant for lights now, and you’re often met with silence. These new AI assistants, engineered for fluid conversation, have forgotten how to set a timer or give a weather report.
They ignore the routines they were built to run. Here’s the painful twist: Apple’s Siri, a relic from 2015, is now the reliable one. Its decade-old, clunky framework actually works.
Companies have traded a predictable servant for an erratic, chatty one.
As for Apple's Siri, it's still firmly stuck in the last decade of voice assistants, and it appears it will stay there for a while longer. The problem is that the new assistants aren't as consistent at controlling smart home devices as the old ones. While they were often frustrating to use, the old Alexa and Google Assistant (and the current Siri) would generally always turn on the lights when you asked them to, provided you used precise nomenclature.
Today, their "upgraded" counterparts struggle with consistency in basic functions like turning on the lights, setting timers, reporting on the weather, playing music, and running the routines and automations on which many of us have built our smart homes. I've noticed this in my testing, and online forums are full of users who have encountered it. Amazon and Google have acknowledged the struggles they've had in making their revamped generative AI-powered assistants reliably perform basic tasks.
And it's not limited to smart home assistants; ChatGPT can't consistently tell time or count. Why is this, and will it ever get better? To understand the problem, I spoke with two professors in the field of human-centric artificial intelligence with experience with agentic AI and smart home systems.
My takeaway from those conversations is that, while it's possible to make these new voice assistants do almost exactly what the old ones did, it will take a lot of work, and that's possibly work most companies just aren't interested in doing. Basically, we're all beta testers for the AI. Considering there are limited resources in this field and ample opportunity to do something much more exciting (and more profitable) than reliably turn on the lights, that's the way they're moving, according to experts I spoke with.
The professors cited by The Verge point to a cynical market truth. The technical capability for a reliably intelligent assistant exists. According to them, the industry simply isn’t building it.
Why? Fixing a broken light switch is unglamorous engineering. Chasing the next conversational thrill is profitable marketing.
The result is a permanent beta test. Progress now means trading function for potential. In that light, Siri’s stagnation looks less like failure and more like a coherent product.
It’s a known quantity. The alternative is a home that talks like a genius but acts like a fool, leaving you to fumble for the light switch in the dark.
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Common Questions Answered
Why are modern AI voice assistants struggling with smart home device control in 2025?
The new generation of AI assistants have unexpectedly become less reliable at executing basic smart home commands compared to older versions. While they demonstrate advanced capabilities in other domains, these assistants paradoxically fail to consistently perform simple tasks like turning on lights or managing home devices.
How is Siri specifically impacted by the current smart home AI transformation?
Siri remains largely unchanged and stuck in an outdated interaction model, failing to adapt to more complex smart home environments. Apple's voice assistant continues to lag behind emerging AI technologies, unable to match the evolving expectations of intelligent home device management.
What unexpected regression has occurred with AI voice assistants in smart home technology?
Contrary to expectations, the latest AI voice assistants have introduced a fundamental reliability problem in device control, becoming less consistent than their predecessors. Despite significant advances in AI capabilities, these new assistants struggle to perform basic home automation tasks with the precision of older voice assistant models.
