Alexa+ Voice Routines

Expanding one of Alexa’s most loved features with natural conversation and AI capabilities

The Challenge

Routines are one of Alexa’s most powerful and loved features, with 38.4M daily active users executing over 1B weekly actions. Routines allow customers to initiate multiple actions (playing music, controlling smart home devices, turning on lights, etc) with a voice command (like saying “Alexa, Start my morning”) or other triggers (like coming home after work). Despite their popularity, customers research reported that creating and managing routines felt confusing, hidden in the Alexa app, and too time-consuming. Creating a routine in the Alexa app could take 15+ steps, requiring deep knowledge of available actions that left many new customers dissatisfied with the experience.

With the increased agentic capabilites of Alexa+, my team reimagining Routines to include generative AI actions, support conversational creation, and address long-standing pain points around troubleshooting. We led an 18-month initiative to modernize the routines system and launch a conversational, voice-first experience alongside Alexa+.

My Role

As the conversational UX designer on the Alexa+ Routines team, I led conversational design for the new routines experience. I collaborated with a senior UX designer, product managers, engineers, and AI/ML teams to deliver a scalable conversational system that could expand over time. My responsibilities included:

  • Helping define launch scope by advocating for user needs while balancing technical constraints

  • Integrating new genAI-powered actions and dynamic behaviors

  • Defining conversational customer journeys across Echo devices, web, Alexa app, and smart speakers

Process

Routines are powerful, but also inherently complex. I focused on key challenges to make them conversational, intuitive, and AI-ready:

Simplification. Research showed most users want simple, goal-driven automations. Instead of asking customers to search for specific actions, we allowed them to express intent naturally (“Alexa, help me create a bedtime routine for the kids”). This required prioritizing the highest-value actions, setting clear conversational boundaries, and ensuring the system gracefully handled incomplete or ambiguous requests.

Reliable AI Actions. Generative AI actions are open-ended. Users can say almost anything, but they execute at runtime, which introduces failure cases not found in deterministic routines. To preserve customer trust, I designed clear expectation-setting language, informative confirmation prompts, and conversational troubleshooting in case results differed from what customers expected.

Awareness & Editing on Device. In the past customers had to go deep in the Alexa app to create or edit routines. We introduced the ability to view, edit, and cancel routines directly on any Echo device, bringing visibility and control closer to where routines actually run.

Personalization and Privacy. This launch included personalized routines, which allows users to create automations triggered only by a specific person (“When Rachel says good morning…”). This required updating the Alexa app UI and incorporating transparent language so customers understood who and what would trigger their routine. Mismatches between expectation and behavior erode trust, so much of my work focused on ensuring clarity, predictability, and high customer comprehension.


Impact

The launch of voice routines in 2025, modernized one of Alexa’s most essential features and built the foundation for a more conversational, intelligent, and intuitive smart home experience. Voice creation fundamentally changed how customers interact with routines on Alexa+. It is now the primary method for creating new routines and AI actions are the second most used actions within routines. Customers who create routines by voice are more engaged, having almost twice as many executed routines and more active routines in their account compared to non-voice creation users. 

Following the Alexa+ launch, I continue to lead iterative releases to expand triggers, improve troubleshooting, and support new AI capabilities.


“I asked it to fix one of my old broken Alexa Routines and it did it! It just works.”


“I was even able to build a routine… just by talking to the Echo Show. That’s next-level accessible! This feature alone could turn out to be the killer smart home app.”
— USA Today Review


A detailed case study is available upon request