Alexa+ Voice Routines

Expanding one of the most loved Alexa features with natural conversation and AI capabilities.

The Challenge

Routines are one of the most powerful features on Amazon’s Alexa, enabling customers to trigger a personalized sequences of actions, from playing music to controlling smart home devices, with a simple command like “Alexa, start my morning.” With 38.4 million daily active users driving over 1 billion actions each week, Routines had already proven it’s value at massive scale. Despite its popularity, user research revealed opportunities to raise the customer experience bar: creating and managing routines was complex, buried in the Alexa app, and required navigating 15+ steps along with deep knowledge of available actions. This friction left many users unable to fully realize the feature’s potential and lost if there were any issues.

With the huge expansion of generative AI capabilities coming with the launch of Alexa+, our team saw opportunities to fundamentally rethink the routines experience. Over an 18-month initiative we reimagined Routines as a conversational, voice-first system that enables customers to create, modify, and troubleshoot automations naturally by talking to Alexa. This work made Routines dramatically easier to create and manage, and led to it being a central experience within Alexa+.

 

This project enabled users to naturally ask for routines and automations with a quick conversation, removing the burden to navigate the large amount of routine control settings in the Alexa app.

 

My Role

As the senior conversational UX designer on the Alexa+ Routines team, I led conversational voice design for the new routines experience. I collaborated with a senior UX designer, UX researcher, 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 screened devices, web, the Alexa app, and smart speaker devices.

 

My high level customer flow for creating a routine through a conversation with Alexa

 

Process

Routines are powerful, but also inherently complex. I focused on key challenges to ensure the redesign was conversational, intuitive, and AI-ready:

Awareness & Editing by Voice. In the past customers had to go deep in the Alexa app menus 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. Customers no longer had to open an app to create routines, they could just tell Alexa what they wanted and have a natural conversation about it.

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

Reliable AI Actions. Generative AI actions are naturally worded requests that allows customers to describe almost anything they’d like to happen in the routine (ex. “...then tell me the warmest time to run today based on the forecast”). However, since the model executes these request at runtime it introduced failure cases not found in deterministic routines. To preserve customer trust, I designed clear expectation-setting language, informative confirmations, and conversational troubleshooting in case results differed from the customer’s expectations.

Personalization and Privacy. Triggers were updated to include profile level recognition signals, enabling users to create personalized and private automations just for themselves rather than the whole family (“When Rachel says good morning…”). This required updating the Alexa app UI and incorporating transparent language so customers understand who and what will trigger their routine. Mismatches between expectation and behavior quickly erode trust, so I focused on designing for predictability and testing to ensure high customer comprehension.


 

Users can still manage routines in the Alexa app, but with new UI controls as well as the ability to simply tell Alexa what they want.

 

Impact

The launch of voice routines in 2025 modernized one of Alexa’s most powerful capabilities 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 custom AI actions are the second most used actions in 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 features, 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.”

— A happy customer




“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

You can learn more about Alexa+ here