Last week, Amazon's 2025 devices event debuted two new Echo smart speakers with Amazon's latest Alexa Plus (Alexa+) voice assistant. Now, Echo Show owners are reporting that its AI-powered updates brought with them a tidal wave of ads that make the device practically unusable.
Previously, Amazon's Echo Show smart displays showed ads mostly through the Shopping Lists feature or Alexa's "By the way" features. It also occasionally played audio ads when using Alexa to listen to Amazon Music. However, several reports on the Alexa subreddit and from The Verge’s Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, who owns more than one Echo Show, found that the number of ads has skyrocketed in recent months.
Full-screen ads marked "sponsored" now pop up between photos in the Photo Frame mode slideshow as well as between content cards for music, recipes, and news. Some Reddit users reported ads showing up alongside the alarm clock and other basic functions as well. To add insult to injury, the displays have also started showing ads for Alexa Plus itself, even though it's still in early access.
The ads are so pervasive that many users said their smart display feels more like a billboard for Amazon these days, and some are considering returning the product outright. It really shouldn't come as a shocker, though. CEO Andy Jassy has promoted the revamped AI-powered voice assistant Alexa Plus, as a new revenue driver for the company's hardware division.
"We have over 600 million Alexa devices out there today, and expect Alexa+ to play an even more vital role in the lives of these hundreds of millions of customers in the future," Jassy said in his annual shareholder letter back in April.
Amazon’s Devices division has long struggled to turn a profit, so it's no surprise that Amazon's pushing ads, one area where it is making money, so hard on them. According to Amazon, the Echo Show is designed to show home screen ads if someone even so much as gets close to the device.
Unlike with the best Kindles, there's no option to buy an ad-free version of the Echo Show. But there are some settings you can tweak to make the ads on your Echo Show a little less obnoxious.
How to limit ads on your Echo Show
To make the Echo Show's ads less obnoxious, users on Reddit have shared two workarounds. For the first, you'll need to set a routine in the Alexa app. Tap the More option at the bottom (the icon with the three stacked lines), select Routines, and tap the plus icon. Select Add an event to choose when your trigger will start, tap Add action, select Custom, and type in: Alexa, start Photo Frame.
Alternatively, changing the language on your Echo Show device to English/Canada also seems to do the trick. Just swipe down from the top of the device, select Settings, scroll down, tap Device Options, then Device Language.
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