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Amazon’s new and improved version of Alexa is here, and it’s called Alexa+. The next-gen upgrade is more conversational, can execute complex tasks, and is much more personalized. While the rollout starts next month on select Echo Show devices, Amazon claims it’ll eventually be available on every Alexa-powered device the company has shipped. It’ll cost $20 per month but will be free for Amazon customers.
Here’s everything you need to know about Amazon’s new and improved virtual assistant.
Alexa’s Generative AI Era
Amazon says Alexa+ is “smarter than she’s ever been before,” capable of picking up on your tone and delivering answers in a more empathetic voice. It even has more powerful visual capabilities.
During a live demo, Panos Panay, who heads up Amazon’s Devices and Services department, used an Echo Show to snap a photo of the live audience and asked whether folks looked energetic. The crowd applauded at the start of the interaction, and Alexa+ analyzed the picture and said everyone looked “pretty fired up,” pointing out finer details like how people had laptops open, and that all eyes were on Panay.
Julian Chokkattu
The other big new feature is Alexa+’s ability to learn new information you provide. You can feed the assistant documents, emails, study guides, and recipes, and it will memorize it all, allowing you to ask for relevant information later. For example, if you upload a document of the rules from your homeowner’s association, you can ask Alexa+ a question like, “Can I add solar panels to my house?” It will reference the rules. You can refer to any recipes you’ve used before—or handwritten recipes you’ve fed to the assistant—and ask specific questions about ingredients or measurements.
The broad theme is that you can generally ask Alexa+ a question in a natural way and it should be able to help in some way. Where before you may have asked Alexa to “show me my doorbell feed,” now you can ask Alexa+, “When was the last time someone took the dog out for a walk?” You’ll need a Ring subscription, but Alexa+ can understand the context of what it sees through your security cameras.
Alexa+ is also supposed to be a lot easier to interact with daily. You can create routines using your voice rather than manually setting things up through the app. It’s easier to shift music throughout your house too. You can move it from speaker to speaker by simply saying, “Play the music downstairs,” or “Play the music everywhere, but don’t wake the baby,” and Alexa+ will know to play it in every room except the nursery.
In a live demo, Panay played the song “Shallow” from A Star Is Born, and moved the song around the room by asking Alexa+ to play the music on the left side or the right. Panay said the company didn’t set any prompts up and just placed the Amazon Show devices around the room, but it all worked seamlessly. He then asked Alexa+ to jump straight to the scene in the movie—it did this on a Fire TV via Amazon’s Prime Video app.
The last time Alexa received a significant facelift was in 2023. The company announced that it was integrating advanced ChatGPT-like capabilities—with the ability to handle more complex queries, participate in open-ended conversations (without constantly repeating “Alexa” before each prompt), and convey emotion based on prompts. But since then, Amazon has fallen behind competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
Last year, there were multiple reports of Amazon’s struggles with its in-house AI, which sometimes took up to seven seconds to register a prompt and reply. It was later announced that the company entered a “strategic collaboration” with AI startup Anthropic as its “primary training partner.” Alexa+ utilizes both Amazon’s Nova models and large language models from Anthropic, “a model-agnostic system, allowing it to select the best model for any given task.”
There was no new Amazon hardware announced at the event, though Amazon teased out that many of these features are coming to a new Alexa.com web experience alongside and an entirely new phone app.
Unlike Alexa, the improved Alexa+ will cost you money: $20 per month. It’s free if you have an Amazon Prime membership. Amazon says early access will begin to roll out next month in the US, beginning with the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21. After that, the rollout will be in waves, but the new assistant should be accessible on nearly every Alexa-powered device Amazon has shipped.
This is a developing story.