PSA: Alexa Plus may be why your smart clock has become useless

Alexa Plus is Amazon’s new paid digital assistant. Available for $20 per month (or included for free, if you’re a Prime subscriber), Alexa Plus injects extra AI functionality into your Amazon devices, like the ability to engage in more natural conversation-style interactions with Alexa through an Echo device. Turns out, it can also make some unhelpful changes to your Echo Show’s home screen.

In a post on the Amazon Echo subreddit, user Setati complains that their Echo Show 5 has recently become less fit for one of their primary use cases: telling the time. Setati writes that “about the same time as Alexa+,” their Show 5 started showing content that it didn’t before, replacing the full-screen clock with “news briefs and things it thinks I want to see.”

The problem does indeed seem directly related to Alexa Plus, which adds an assortment of new functions to Echo devices logged into accounts that are subscribed to the paid service. Comments on the post echo Setati’s complaint. One user says that cycling power to their own Show temporarily restores the clock face they’re used to, but that the home screen eventually changes to again hide the clock.

The solution for Setati was simple: They say that once they canceled Alexa Plus, their Echo Show 5 went back to prominently displaying the time on its home screen again.

If you’ve got an Echo device that’s recently started behaving differently — specifically, an Echo Show device whose home screen has gotten unusually crowded — Alexa Plus could be to blame. You can cancel Alexa Plus in the My Memberships and Subscriptions section of your Amazon account settings.