Amazon Unveils Alexa+: A Leap Forward in Consumer AI Agents

With Alexa+, Amazon makes an intriguing play in the consumer agent space | TechCrunch

Amazon shared an impressive vision of an "agentic" future on Wednesday -- one in which the company's improved Alexa, Alexa+, handles countless mundane tasks, from booking restaurants to finding appliance repairmen. If Amazon can deliver, it could be the first out to the gate with a comprehensive, consumer-focused agent tool. The company hopes to marry a more natural, expressive Alexa -- one powered by generative AI models -- with the ability to tap into first- and third-party apps, services, and platforms in a fully autonomous, intelligent way. "We believe that the future is full of agents -- we have believed this for some time," Amazon Alexa and Echo VP Daniel Rausch said in a keynote Wednesday. "There will be many AI agents out there doing things for customers, many of them will have specialized skills ... And we've also always believed that in a world full of AI, these agents should interact with each other. They should interoperate seamlessly for customers." That'd be a big win for a tech giant struggling to make its long-in-the-tooth assistant relevant again. Amazon has invested for years in Alexa without significant revenue to show for it; the company's hardware division has reportedly burned through billions of dollars. Agents, a nebulous and increasingly diluted term referring to AI models that can take actions on a user's behalf, are the next big thing in AI. The tech industry sees agents as the key to extracting value from increasingly sophisticated models. Agents promise to knock out low-hanging chores and agenda items, boosting people's -- and businesses' -- overall productivity. That's the idea, at least. So far, agents have largely underwhelmed. Major AI labs including Anthropic and OpenAI have launched agents that can take control of a browser to perform actions. But they often make mistakes, and require a fair degree of intervention to accomplish more involved tasks. Other ambitious attempts at agents, like Google's Project Mariner, remain in the prototype stage, without committed release windows. Amazon's demos of Alexa+, which is scheduled to launch in preview starting next month, depicted a more polished agentic experience -- one with few technical hurdles. The company showed the assistant extracting information from a range of sources, including emails, calendars, and stored preferences, to help with daily errands. In one preview during a presser in New York on Wednesday morning, Amazon showed Alexa+ building a grocery shopping list, then ordering items via integrations with Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods, and other local chains. In a separate demo, the company highlighted how Alexa+ can automatically purchase products on Amazon when they go on sale, and reserve spa and fitness appointments through wellness app Vagaro. The agentic capabilities don't stop there, according to Amazon. Alexa+ can place food delivery orders through GrubHub, hail an Uber, find tickets to upcoming concerts on Ticketmaster, put together a travel itinerary drawing on sources like Tripadvisor, and even extract key dates and times from an event flyer to set a reminder. It all sounds very exciting -- and ambitious. And Amazon is arguably well-positioned to succeed, given the retailer's years of data on shopper habits and partnerships with major tech ecosystems and services. Alexa+ users willing to fork over their data stand to benefit from a more personalized, tailored agent experience. It's no accident that Alexa+ -- normally priced at $19.99 a month -- will be free for Prime subscribers, Amazon's most dedicated user cohort. Amazon is also counting on its enormous Alexa installed base -- over 600 million devices -- to jumpstart Alexa+'s adoption. With an Alexa-compatible speaker already in many homes, the company's wagering that Alexa+ will be a no-brainer for many users. Perhaps Amazon's biggest challenge will be overcoming the technical limitations of today's AI tech. Alexa+ has reportedly been delayed repeatedly due to misbehaving models; earlier versions of the experience couldn't answer questions correctly and struggled to turn smart lights off and on. Not for nothing, rivals' baby steps in the direction of agentic tools have suffered their own setbacks. ChatGPT deep research, OpenAI's agentic model for compiling research reports, sometimes hallucinates. Google's Gemini chatbot, meanwhile, spits out factually wrong summaries of emails. It was tough to get a sense of how Alexa+ performed at Wednesday's press event. Many of the demos were highly choreographed, and Amazon didn't allow attendees to use the new assistant at length. We'll have to wait to put Alexa+ through its paces to know if it comes close to fulfilling Amazon's agentic sales pitch. If it does, that'd be a very impressive feat indeed -- and might just give Amazon the lead in the consumer agent race.

Rebuilding Alexa: How Amazon is mixing models, agents and browser-use for smarter AI

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Amazon is betting on agent interoperability and model mixing to make its new Alexa voice assistant more effective, retooling its flagship voice assistant with agentic capabilities and browser-use tasks. This new Alexa has been rebranded to Alexa+, and Amazon is emphasizing that this version "does more." For instance, it can now proactively tell users if a new book from their favorite author is available, or that their favorite artist is in town -- and even offer to buy a ticket. Alexa+ reasons through instructions and taps "experts" in different knowledge bases to answer user questions and complete tasks like "Where is the nearest pizza place to the office? Will my coworkers like it? -- Make a reservation if you think they will." In other words, Alexa+ blends AI agents, computer use capabilities and knowledge it learns from the larger Amazon ecosystem to be what Amazon hopes is a more capable and smarter home voice assistant. Alexa+ currently runs on Amazon's Nova models and models from Anthropic. However, Daniel Rausch, Amazon's VP of Alexa and Echo, told VentureBeat that the device will remain "model agnostic" and that the company could introduce other models (at least models available on Amazon Bedrock) to find the best one for accomplishing tasks. "[It's about] choosing the right integrations to complete a task, figuring out the right sort of instructions, what it takes to actually complete the task, then orchestrating the whole thing," said Rausch. "The big thing to understand about it is that Alexa will continue to evolve with the best models available anywhere on Bedrock." What is model mixing? Model mixing or model routing lets enterprises and other users choose the appropriate AI model to tap on a query-by-query basis. Developers increasingly turn to model mixing to cut costs. After all, not every prompt needs to be answered by a reasoning model; some models perform certain tasks better. Amazon's cloud and AI unit, AWS, has long been a proponent of model mixing. Recently, it announced a feature on Bedrock called Intelligent Prompt Routing, which directs prompts to the best model and model size to resolve the query. And, it could be working. "I can tell you that I cannot say for any given response from Alexa on any given task what model it's using," said Rausch. Agentic interoperability and orchestration Rausch said Alexa+ brings agents together in three different ways. The first is the traditional API; the second is deploying agents that can navigate websites and apps like Anthropic's Computer Use; the third is connecting agents to other agents. "But at the center of it all, orchestrating across all those different kinds of experiences are these baseline, very capable, state-of-the-art LLMs," said Rausch. He added that if a third-party application already has its own agent, that agent can still talk to the agents working inside Alexa+ even if the external agent was built using a different model. Rausch emphasized that the Alexa team used Bedrock's tools and technology, including new multi-agent orchestration tools. Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger told VentureBeat that even earlier versions of Claude won't be able to accomplish what Alexa+ wants. "A really interesting 'Why now?' moment is apparent in the demo, because, of course, the models have gotten better," said Krieger. "But if you tried to do this with 3.0 Sonnet or our 3.0 level models, I think you'd struggle in a lot of ways to use a lot of different tools all at once." Although neither Rausch nor Krieger would confirm which specific Anthropic model Amazon used to build Alexa+, it's worth pointing out that Anthropic released Claude 3.7 Sonnet on Monday, and it is available on Bedrock. Large investments in AI Many user's first brush with AI came through AI voice assistants like Alexa, Google Home or even Apple's Siri. Those let people outsource some tasks, like turning on lights. I do not own an Alexa or Google Home device, but I learned how convenient having one could be when staying at a hotel recently. I could tell the Alexa to stop the alarm, turn on the lights and open a curtain while still under the covers. But while Alexa, Google Home devices, and Siri became ubiquitous in people's lives, they began showing their age when generative AI became popular. Suddenly, people wanted more real-time answers from AI assistants and demanded smarter task resolutions, such as adding multiple meetings to calendars without the need for much prompting. Amazon admitted that the rise of gen AI, especially agents, has made it possible for Alexa to finally meet its potential. "Until this moment, we were limited by the technology in what Alexa could be," Panos Panay, Amazon's devices and services SVP, said during a demo. Rausch said the hope is that Alexa+ continues to improve, add new models and hopefully make more people comfortable with what the technology can do.