Amazon’s Alexa assistant has struggled with both complex and basic tasks for a long time. Amazon has now revealed its revamped Alexa+ assistant, intended to be “smarter, more conversational, more capable, and free with Prime.”
Alexa+ is a new upgraded version of Alexa supercharged by generative AI, which should be significantly better at understanding natural language, in much the same way Google recently overhauled its Assistant with Gemini AI. Amazon says it should become personalized over time as it learns your schedule and preferences, perform actions on your behalf, and provide information. Alexa is supposed to be able to do all those things already, but hey, better late than never.
New Features in Alexa+
One of the main upgrades here is that you can more easily share information with Alexa to build up its knowledge base. You’ll be able to do that from your desktop web browser, the mobile app, or even by forwarding emails. Amazon said in its announcement, “For example, you could send a picture of a live music schedule, and have Alexa add the details to your calendar, [or] upload study materials and ask Alexa to turn them into a quiz.”
Alexa+ also introduces “agentic capabilities” that sound similar to current Alexa skills, but supposedly able to complete more actions on its own. Amazon said, “Alexa+ will be able to navigate the web, use Thumbtack to discover the relevant service provider, authenticate, arrange the repair, and come back to tell you it’s done—there’s no need to supervise or intervene.” Again, we’ve heard ‘Alexa can do things for you’ many times before now, and it hasn’t really been true beyond ordering products from Amazon, so color me skeptical.
Alexa+ will also be available in a web browser, through a similar chatbot interface as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Google Gemini. That could make Alexa much more useful as a shared database and resource that works across all your devices, instead of the current version, which is more like a web browser and media player. Amazon’s web apps and websites tend to be pretty awful, though, so we’ll have to wait and see if the Alexa web app is functional.
How Alexa+ Works
Behind the scenes, Alexa+ runs on Amazon’s Bedrock server infrastructure and selects “the best model for any given task” automatically. That includes models from Anthropic, the company behind the Claude assistant, and Amazon Nova models. Presumably, basic tasks won’t go through a large language model at all, so we don’t need another nuclear power plant’s worth of energy just to order groceries, but Amazon didn’t elaborate on that point.
Amazon also said in a press release, “We built Alexa+ the same way we do any Amazon product—we set out to create something we think customers will love, while also designing it to protect their privacy and security, and provide them with the transparency and control they expect from Amazon. For example, we centralize important information such as your interactions with Alexa+ and various settings into the Alexa Privacy dashboard.”
The Voice modes in ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot are generally better at understanding human speech than the current Alexa assistant. I would expect a generative AI-powered Alexa to have similar abilities, and it should continue evolving over time as the underlying LLMs improve at a rapid rate.
Rollout & Availability
Alexa+ is being sold as a $20 per month subscription, but it’s free for all Amazon Prime members. Amazon Prime is currently priced at $15 per month or $139 per year, or even less if you are a student, so it’s actually cheaper than Alexa+ on its own.
You can sign up to be notified when Alexa+ is available on Amazon’s website. It will start rolling out in the United States “in the next few weeks” across the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21, but should eventually be available to most (if not all) Alexa devices.
Source: Amazon (live blog, press release)
