Amazon Unveils Alexa+: A Smarter, AI-Powered Voice Assistant

A Smarter Alexa Won't Solve These 9 Smart Home Problems

Tired of Killing Your Potted Plants? Here's How NFC Tags Can Help After more than ten years, Alexa is finally getting a much-needed upgrade. Alexa+ promises to make Alexa much smarter, thanks to the power of AI. However, even with Alexa getting smarter, there are many issues with the original that a smarter version won't fix. 9 Smarter Voice Is Still Voice Even though the updated version of Alexa isn't here yet, it's already clear that talking to Alexa is going to be much more conversational than the current version. That's no real surprise; AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini are already capable of holding natural turn-by-turn conversations which make talking to the OG Alexa feel seriously outdated. The demonstrations of Alexa+ make it clear that Alexa is much smarter than before. However, a voice assistant that's better at holding conversations is still a voice assistant. Voice control can be useful under the right circumstances, but a lot of the time it just feels awkward. I set up my smart TV so that I could make it play or pause by asking Alexa, for example, but I always end up reaching for the remote. It feels more effort to speak out loud to Alexa than it does to press a button, and I don't have to worry about Alexa not understanding me and starting to play music instead. Star Trek: The Next Generation made me think that speaking to computers would end up as the dominant way of interacting with them, but the reality is that talking to devices often feels weird. No matter how much smarter Alexa gets, that awkwardness will still be there. 8 Alexa+ Answers Aren't Necessarily More Helpful The current version of Alexa can be helpful for simple requests. You can ask for the weather and get a local weather forecast. If you want anything more complicated, however, Alexa will usually start giving you an answer about something completely unrelated. The demonstrations of the new version of Alexa indicate that you'll be able to get much better answers to more complex questions. You also won't have to keep saying "Alexa" every time you want to ask something more. However, the demos also showed something else that is likely to get annoying fast. Alexa+ seems to have a tendency to give fairly lengthy answers. A long answer isn't a huge issue if you're reading it in an AI chatbot app on your phone. When it's being spoken aloud, however, it can get annoying. We've all got that one friend who takes ten minutes of uninterrupted speech to get across a simple point that should have taken a sentence or two at most. Alexa+ seems like it might turn out to be just like that friend. Even though you can interrupt Alexa+, doing so on a regular basis will get tiresome fast. What's worse is that the new Alexa appears to want to ask follow-up questions that you haven't asked for. In promotional videos, Alexa asks if you want it to play the next season of a show after you finish the final episode or if you want it to play your chill mix when you wake up. I don't want my voice assistant to suggest things that I don't want; it's just another annoyance. If I wanted it to do something, I would have asked it to. 7 Alexa Routines Are Unlikely to Get Smarter One of the features of Alexa+ that's being promised is the ability to create routines with your voice. For example, you can ask Alexa to open the blinds, play your morning playlist, and turn on the coffee machine at the same time every weekday morning. It's a much simpler way than creating them in the app. However, Alexa routines are very limited in their scope. You're restricted to routines in the format of "when X happens, do Y." This is fine for simple automations, such as turning on the lights when the front door smart lock is unlocked. However, this format isn't enough for many automations. If you want the lights to turn on when you unlock the front door, but only if it's dark, you can't create a routine that can do this, even if you have a motion sensor that can detect light levels. Routines aren't able to handle more complicated automations in the form "when X happens, if Y is true, do Z." Alexa getting smarter will make it easier to create simple routines, but it won't let you create even slightly more complex ones. 6 Many Features Only Work With Specific Brands One of the major benefits of using Alexa as your smart home hub is that there are a huge number of Alexa-compatible devices available. You can connect smart home devices from most major brands to Alexa and control them using your voice. However, not all smart home devices will work with Alexa. The Eve Outdoor Cam, for example, is a HomeKit-compatible camera that will work with Apple HomeKit but doesn't support Alexa. Other devices require the use of hubs or dedicated Alexa skills to work. The demonstrations of Alexa's capabilities appear to indicate that this may be even more of an issue with Alexa+. For example, in one demonstration, Alexa was asked whether anyone had walked the dog that day. Alexa was able to scan the footage from the connected security cameras to see if the dog had been taken out or not. This sounds like a useful feature, but it appeared to require the use of Ring cameras for it to work. Ring is, of course, owned by Amazon, so the tie-in makes sense. The trouble is that the feature may not work with other brands of cameras, meaning that you're restricted to specific products, which aren't necessarily the best options for your needs. It's always been a chore having to check whether smart home products are compatible with your smart home ecosystem of choice (and a big reason why I use Home Assistant which will work with most devices regardless of ecosystem). It seems like Alexa+ will only make this problem worse, limiting the products you can use if you want to take advantage of the full feature set. 5 Alexa+ Further Binds You to Amazon's Ecosystem Another demo showed Alexa identifying a song from the movie A Star is Born. Alexa was then asked to go to the part of the movie where the song features, and it was able to open the movie to the appropriate section on an Amazon Fire TV. Again, this all seems very impressive. However, it took place on an Amazon Fire TV which was playing the movie on Amazon Prime Video. Do you see where this is going? If you ask Alexa to do the same with your LG TV when you're watching Netflix, and you're going to get nowhere fast. The trouble is, Amazon doesn't have a huge incentive to make these features available on other platforms. Just look at Netflix, which briefly made its streaming service play nicely with Apple TV, only to turn the useful feature off again because they'd rolled it out by mistake. If you need an Amazon Fire TV and Prime Video to make an Alexa+ feature work, that's a good thing for Amazon, even if it's a bad thing for consumers. 4 You'll Need to Share Huge Amounts of Information With Amazon The current version of Alexa already knows a lot about you. Almost everything you say to the device (and potentially some things that you don't) all gets sent to Amazon's servers alongside the information that Amazon already knows about you and your home. Alexa+ needs even more access and this is the part that scares me most. For many of the new features to work, you're going to need to let Amazon have access to a lot of your data. The presentation cited Alexa having access to your schedule, your smart home devices, your entertainment preferences, the people in your household, your emails, and the apps that you use, to name but a few. For the features to work, you need to grant Alexa access to most facets of your life, which is a huge privacy concern. The example of asking if the dog has been walked requires giving Amazon access to all the footage from your security cameras. Just think about that for a minute. Not only can Alexa hear everything you do in your home, but it can see everything you do, too. Amazon has already been letting employees listen to and annotate audio recordings captured by Alexa devices. There's nothing to say that it wouldn't do the same with video. 3 Alexa+ Is Limited to Screens (for Now) Alexa+ still isn't out yet, and when it is, it will initially only be available on the Echo Show 8, Echo Show 10, Echo Show 15, and Echo Show 21. This is incredibly annoying as someone who owns an Echo Show 5 and an Echo Hub, literally the only two Echo devices with screens that aren't on the list. That list also indicates that many of the features of Alexa+ will require the use of a screen. Amazon says that it will eventually be available on most Echo devices, but those cheap Echo Dots you have all over your home may not see the same boost in performance as the more expensive smart displays will see. 2 Not Everyone Gets the Same Features Here's something else that has always been an issue with Alexa and looks set to continue: despite selling Echo products around the globe, not everyone gets the same features. Early access to Alexa+ is only available in the US, and there's no indication as to when it will come to other countries. Even when it does launch, the experience is unlikely to be the same worldwide. There are plenty of useful Alexa features, such as the Alexa Guard feature that could detect the sound of smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, that simply never made it to other countries. That won't stop Amazon from charging everyone the same, however. 1 A Lot of What Alexa Can Do Is Already Available Amazon has taken a long time to get around to finally announcing the updated version of Alexa, and it still hasn't been released yet. In the meantime, people are used to using AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini on their phones or computers. Much of what Alexa+ is being promoted to do (including the ability to hold natural conversations, change tack in the middle of a conversation, or the ability to interrupt a response), are things that people have already been doing for some time with other apps. If you're paying a subscription fee for an AI chatbot such as Anthropic's Claude or OpenAI's ChatGPT, you have very little incentive to use an updated version of Alexa that does a lot of the same things, especially when you have to pay for the privilege. Indeed, many of the new Alexa's capabilities are powered by Anthropic's AI models rather than Amazon's own. Apple was late to the party with AI and is still playing catch-up. Amazon has turned up even later and doesn't seem to be offering a lot more. Some features seem useful, such as the ability to get Alexa to make a restaurant reservation for you. However, the feature isn't live yet, and other competitors such as ChatGPT already have similar features available for some users. Alexa arrived with a huge amount of promise, but it hasn't improved in years. Amazon is finally giving Alexa a major update, but making Alexa smarter won't solve all of its problems. It doesn't fix the fundamental issues such as ecosystem lock-in, serious privacy concerns, and that awkward feeling of talking to a speaker.

Amazon's generative AI vision for Alexa is appealing, but unproven

Amazon's long-awaited update to its assistant is almost here. About 18 months after the company first built with generative AI, it unveiled Alexa+, and early access will be available starting in March. Alexa+ will exist alongside the older Alexa and will cost $20 a month, unless you have a Prime membership, which will make it free to use. The new assistant will come with all the modern upgrades that its contemporaries like the redesigned Siri or Gemini offer, like more conversational interaction, better contextual understanding and the ability to "summarize complex topics" and "make suggestions based on your interests." But it does one thing differently, and it's the way Amazon purports to integrate with third-party apps and the rest of the internet that could set it apart. At the presentation, vice president of Alexa and Fire TV Daniel Rausch outlined three ways the new assistant can integrate with other services you use. Firstly, it already works with "tens of thousands" of integrations already available, with Uber, Sonos, Samsung and Xbox being a few of the many logos that were displayed when Rausch said this. Presumably, that means Amazon worked with these partners to get their apps to play nicely with Alexa+ through their APIs. Secondly, for the large swath of the online world that doesn't have apps or the resources to code an API just for Alexa+, the assistant should be able to scour the internet for their website and navigate it on your behalf. During the presentation, Rausch demonstrated how Alexa+ was able to go to the Thumbtack website to hire a professional to fix his oven. Instead of having to whip out a phone or laptop to click through menus himself, Rausch could just verbally tell Alexa+ what he needed and what times he was available, and the AI did the rest. This example in particular struck me as very similar to Google's , which, since way back in 2018, could call businesses on your behalf to book a table. All you had to do was tell Google what date and times you were considering, how many people were in your party and it would make the call for you, even speaking in a human-sounding voice to the restaurant. The way Alexa+ would click around websites on your behalf seems like Duplex on steroids. Finally, Alexa+ can work with the "AI agents" on other sites, so you can talk to just one assistant instead of dozens of chatbots. In the presentation, Rausch got Alexa+ to work with to come up with a country-style song about bodega cats. After the company's presentation, I spoke with Rausch to get more clarity on how Alexa+ will work with the rest of the online world. For one, I wanted to know for sure if that third method would work with customer service chatbots from companies like Capital One, United Airlines and more. While Rausch said that he had no details to share on specific names or services, he did confirm that "the SDK is all about integrations like that," saying it's for people to use Alexa to connect with agents on their behalf to complete tasks. Rausch is aware that any friction at all in the adoption and setup process can turn people away. To that end, upgrading to Alexa+ should not require any additional sign-ins or authentication. You should be able to have all your connected appliances, security cameras and home routines carry over without any effort. "The reason that customers love Alexa is it takes away all the complexity," Rausch said. People don't need to remember the brand of the WeMo plug they bought, for example, to be able to tell Alexa to turn off a lamp. "We would never take that away," he said. When you're adding new services after upgrading to Alexa+, Rausch said you'll either do so "in the ways that you do it today" or that it'll get even easier, since "Alexa can walk you through those setups in many more cases." According to Rausch, instead of having to "dig around in the Alexa app, you just say 'Alexa, I want to set up a streaming account with Hulu' or something." You'll be presented with a QR code on an Echo device with a screen to facilitate that, and the assistant should guide users along the way. "We like to say Alexa is an expert, and now an expert on herself." Amazon isn't the only company that has made its assistant perform tech support for users. This approach is very similar to how Siri can teach you how to, say, shoot a video in Cinematic mode or create a Genmoji. Where better to get help about a product you're using than the product itself? Why make me go to a different place for information? "From a customer experience perspective, customers just want the thing done," Rausch said. "They don't have to be responsible or care about any of these things, right?" He believes people just want the plumber or a reservation booked, and don't want to fuss around with websites and phone calls. People do want their digital assistant to be helpful and easy to use, but isn't it equally important that these AI services are accurate and reliable? When I asked Rausch how Amazon worked around the tendency of generative AI to hallucinate and sometimes spread misinformation, he said "I actually think in the industry, there's been a mistake of thinking a model is a product." He also said "LLMs are at the foundation of the architecture, but they're not the only thing answering the question." In other words, Alexa+ is using a combination of Amazon's knowledge graphs, reliable sources on the internet and partnerships with authoritative outlets. "Other products will simply give you an answer out of the LLM. If you're asking for an authoritative answer, that's not actually sometimes the way to get one. and I think that's what you're highlighting," he said. Rausch added that Amazon has "taken great care" with Alexa. "Will it make mistakes? Every piece of software makes mistakes," he said. "But we're working hard to ground it in knowledge." I've yet to try out Alexa+ for myself, and everything we've seen so far has been in highly controlled demos, so it's hard to tell what real world performance will be like. But if the new Alexa is truly able to work with third-party services in a way that's seamless and effective, it would not only bring Amazon back into the consumer AI race, but could possibly give it an advantage over the likes of Google, Apple and OpenAI. Considering Amazon really brought the idea of a virtual assistant into homes around the world, this could also have an impact that goes beyond the tech-savvy users of today's AI services.

I saw Alexa+ in action. Here are my 8 biggest takeaways

The new AI-supercharged Alexa is finally coming to an Echo display near you. Here's what looks most promising -- and problematic. After more than a year out of sight, Alexa+-the new Alexa with its AI-powered revamp-took center stage at a crowded coming-out party in New York City on Wednesday, and I got a first-hand look at what this turbocharged voice assistant can do. Following the big unveiling, we were all led to a demonstration hall with about a half-dozen break-out rooms, where we were able to see and hear -- but not participate in -- Alexa's new conversational tricks, from controlling smart home devices and researching sports tickets to suggesting recipes and dialing up tunes on Amazon Prime Video. If all that sounds like old hat, consider this: While the old Alexa requires falling back into what Amazon devices head Panos Panay rightfully described as "Alexa-speak," the new Alexa is a far more flexible and understanding companion, capable of sussing out your intentions from the vaguest of queries, and -- at least, from what I saw on Wednesday -- getting it right more than it failed. While the demonstrations we saw appeared carefully choreographed, we were frequently assured that what we were seeing and hearing was the "live" Alexa+, rather than a canned demo -- and from someone who's spent a fair amount of time with ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode, the exchanges sounded genuine. Here are my biggest takeaways after sitting through Amazon's Alexa+ show-and-tell, starting with... Naturally, everyone's waiting for the new AI-powered Alexa to bungle a command or start hallucinating, but the demos I saw on Wednesday went surprisingly smoothly. Granted, the Amazon presenters on hand were likely sticking to a pre-arranged script, asking the same questions and issuing the same commands over and over. Still, the questions and queries were open-ended enough to invite mistakes. Yet I witnessed only one genuine screw-up on Alexa+'s part: When asked to move a music selection to a speaker in "the office," it instead began playing an episode of The Office on Peacock. Oops! On a few other occasions, Alexa+ appeared to freeze when asked a question, but those pauses could be chalked up to the din of the demonstration hall (I myself had a difficult time hearing) and/or an overloaded Wi-Fi network. One of the biggest pain points when using voice assistants to control smart home devices is the dreaded, "Sorry, I don't know which light bulb you mean," or "I can't help with that." It's gotten so bad lately that I almost never use my smart speakers for smart home control anymore, relying instead on apps, routines, or old-fashioned buttons and switches. Alexa+ promises to get us using our smart speakers again, thanks mainly to its ability to ponder what we're saying and then deducing what our intentions are. For example, in one demo, Alexa+ was asked to turn on the light in the "sitting room," an area (we were told) that hadn't been previously defined within the smart home setup. The new Alexa turned on a lamp positioned near a sofa, correctly guessing that the light was located in a sitting area. Of course, a home might have several different potential "sitting areas" with multiple lamps next to sofas, but the demonstration does show how Alexa+ can get creative (hopefully not too creative) when it comes to understanding smart home commands. We also saw how Alexa+ can pull up videos from your Ring history, plucking out selections based on queries like, "Show me when the kids were playing in the snow," as well as (in a separate demo) how Alexa+ could make it way easier to move music from one smart speaker to another, cutting down on those irksome "Sorry, I don't see a dining room speaker" flubs. Finally, there's the promise of Alexa+ creating routines based on natural-language voice prompts. For example, this query: "The family is having a hard time getting ready for bed at night, can you help create a routine to solve that," yielded this automation: "Every night at 9 p.m., Alexa will announce 'it's time to get ready for bed' on all devices, then all the lights will dim to 50 percent brightness before turning off completely." Not bad, and you can always follow up with tweaks to perfect the routine. I've recently been fascinated by how generative AI can make an excellent cook's companion, crafting recipes on the fly and making suggestions on ingredient substitutions, but Alexa+ could take those abilities to the next level. Besides the fact that the new Alexa can operate from a kitchen smart display-a far easier setup than juggling a phone with slimy food hands -- Alexa+ can remember what ingredients you have (you will need to tell it or show it what's in your cupboard or fridge), and it can also take note of who in the family likes what, then order the proper ingredients on Amazon Fresh or another supported online grocery store ("supported" is the key word; more on that in a moment). I also like the fact that Alexa+ sources thousands of recipes from partner publications -- meaning it's not just scraping recipes off the web and then concocting its own versions (with sometimes questionable results). Similar to the classic Alexa, the new AI Alexa can be something of a motor mouth, nattering on excitedly about how it "loves" that song you picked, praising you for "hitting the nail on the head," opining that a certain TV show is the "perfect antidote to the Sunday blues," and so on. Such verbal flourishes will be familiar to anyone who's chatted with ChatGPT in Advanced Voice Mode, and the sycophantic buttering-up gets tiresome after awhile. I can certainly imagine times when I'd want Alexa+ to simply tee up a playlist without the asides. Luckily, I was told that it will be possible to tone down Alexa+'s responses with a prompt like, "Simpler please." The amount of tasks that Alexa+ can actually do, from teeing up music tracks to booking dinner reservations, scheduling events and service appointments is impressive, and stands in contrast to how ChatGPT and Google Gemini are still fairly isolated within their respective chatboxes. (Gemini is taking its first steps in the smart home via extensions in the Gemini app.) But many of Alexa+'s abilities are tied to service providers that have already partnered with Amazon. So, you can book a carpet cleaning appointment thanks to Alexa's integration with Thumbtack, you can't book an annual checkup through ZocDoc, which hasn't teamed up with Amazon-at least not yet. And while Alexa+ will be able to order groceries from Amazon services like Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods, it probably won't be much help for a FreshDirect customer like me (or at least not until FreshDirect forges an alliance with Amazon). Some of the most impressive demos during Wednesday's unveiling involved Alexa+'s abilities to absorb lengthy documents -- including personal ones -- which it can then summarize and answer questions about. In one example, the new Alexa poured over a complex homeowners association agreement, explaining the various rules and plucking out key details. Alexa+ can also remember personal preferences, such as favorite restaurants, who your best friends are, what music genres you favor, and so on. The more Alexa+ knows about you, the more powerful it gets as a personal assistant. But as with the "classic" Alexa, privacy will surely be a thorny issue with Alexa+, and one should probably think twice before allowing the AI to scour sensitive documents like health or financial records. For its part, Amazon says the new Alexa is designed to "protect [the] privacy and security" of its customers, while providing "transparency and control." Amazon also notes that it will "centralize" privacy controls, while promising "world-class privacy and security protection" through the "secure infrastructure" of Amazon Web Services. The new Alexa will work on "almost all" existing Echo devices, including the diminutive Echo Dot, I'm told. (Some of the "earliest" Amazon smart speakers won't work with Alexa+, including the first-generations of the Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Plus.) That said, you'll need to be the owner of an Echo Show display to get first dibs on the new Alexa. Amazon is rolling out Alexa+ in phases (starting in the "coming weeks"), and owners of Echo devices with displays -- including the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 -- will get access first. If you do become an early Alexa+ user, the new assistant will work across all your compatible Echo devices, including speaker-only products like the Echo Dot. [Further reading: These are the best smart speakers and displays] Once the free early access period is up, Amazon will charge $19.99 a month for Alexa+. "Ouch," I initially thought, but that wasn't the full story. As it turns out, Alexa+ will be free for Prime members, making the new Alexa the latest Prime benefit. That's terrific news for those (many) of us already shelling out for Prime, and thus making it far more likely that a lapsed Alexa user like me will give the new AI-enhanced version a go.

Up close with Alexa Plus - this may finally be the Echo upgrade I've been waiting for

I don't want to overstate things but, between us, Alexa Plus may be the Alexa you've been waiting for. Amazon unveiled its massive digital assistant overhaul, which makes the platform smarter, more conversational, more personal, proactive, and a true doer. I might've considered this all a bit of hype if I hadn't seen so many live demos and, yes, even tried it out for myself. Alexa Plus is Amazon's first attempt at a true generative AI system that can respond to natural language prompts, retain context, remember facts about you and your life, and quickly solve prompts that range from building grocery lists to figuring out if anyone has walked the family dog. After Amazon CEO Andy Jassy gave us a deep model dive and Amazon Devices head Panos Panay and other execs walked us through the details of the new Alexa Plus (along with Alexa.com and the new app), Amazon walked me through a series of demos that illustrated the platforms new, and formidable AI powers. Executives tell me that the device manages its queries locally on device and in the cloud. The decision depends on complexity, and those requiring AI models will largely be in the cloud. The Alexa Plus smart home demo was a true eye-opener from an impact standpoint. Amazon Alexa VP Scott Durhan showed us on an Echo Show (all demos were on the 21-inch smart display) how he could say to Alexa, "I've been away on business, can I see a quick summary of what's happened in the house while I was away?" Alexa Plus works with Ring (also owned by Amazon) and uses the platform's new smart video search (a premium service) to quickly find video snapshots from around the home that are within that time frame. One of the hallmarks of the new Alexa Plus is its ability to maintain context and answer follow-up questions. Durham asked if his dog had gotten walks in that time frame, and Alexa Plus returned videos showing when the dog was taken outside. Durham, notably, did not have to repeat Alexa's name or spell out every detail of what he wanted in the prompt (they call this old way of engaging with the digital assistant "Alexa Speak") to add details like the fact that he owns a dog or its name. Durham had shared that information previously with Alexa Plus, and it was remembered and integrated into the system. One of my frustrations with the current Alexa platform is that, even when you use the app, it is still incredibly difficult to set up away routines. I want to just speak to Alexa and make it happen. Durham showed me how you can now simply describe what you want, "I'm gonna be away for a week, can you create a routine so that the lights kind of come on and look like someone's home." A moment later, Alexa Plus created an "Away Mode Lights 7PM-to-9PM" routine. That was simple and effective. There's also the long-standing issue of naming smart gadgets in the home and Alexa not responding properly unless you use that exact name in your query. Alexa Plus doesn't seem to mind some significant vagueness. You can tell it that you want it to turn off a light in the sitting room, and it will turn off the light in that room, which is called "Sofa Light," even though you didn't call it by name. I only hope that Alexa Plus works as well in the real world (read "my smart home"). We also got a look at Alexa Plus' upcoming grocery feature, which can work with Amazon Fresh (among other grocers) to build meal plans and grocery lists based on skeletal information. I told Alexa Plus that I wanted to build a dinner for vegetarians who like meat-like products. Soon, I had dishes using ingredients like Beyond Meat. When I asked for side dishes that would work, it remembered the vegetarian aspect and found foods like corn on the cob and vegetarian cole slaw. Alexa Plus can then quickly take those recipes and spin up a shopping list that you can alter by tapping the screen or asking it to change specific grocery items. Alexa Plus' ability to stay in the moment was remarkable. Alexa Plus can also read documents you email to alexa@alexa.com. Sending Alexa one of your emails may seem odd and a bit of a privacy issue, but assuming you trust Amazon, it's easy enough to do. We saw how when you mail Alexa an email describing an upcoming tennis match (you can also send PDFs, Word Docs, and TXT files), Alexa Plus can identify that there's an event and automatically add it to your calendar, which will appear on the Echo Show. If the doc has multiple events, Alexa Plus will email you back and ask which one you want to add. We saw how you can query Alexa Plus and ask, "Where is my first match?" If there's a small detail you need from the email, you can ask about that and then tell Alexa Plus to memorize it and remind you if you need any equipment for the match. Naturally, Amazon execs showed us how easy it is to go from talking about the match to asking Alexa Plus to help you find a new tennis racquet. It can even watch for deals on the racquet of your choice. For now, this only works with Amazon and not third-party retailers. One of the most entertaining demos was using Alexa Plus to discover and find music and movies with only scant information. Watching this demo, I felt like Amazon must have been listening in on conversations between me and my wife, where we try to describe a movie or TV show to each other: "It has that guy in from Dawson's Creek, but he's on a boat...?" I watched as Alexa Plus deftly handled piecemeal prompts like, "What is the song that Phoebe thinks is about Tony Danza?" Alexa Plus knew it was "Hold Me Closer Tiny Dancer" and we were referring to the Friends episode where Phoebe thinks it's about the Who's the Boss? star. We went through a series of movie prompts that reminded me of Jeopardy! questions where we failed to stump Alexa Plus. Alexa Plus is not just smart about entertainment; it's also pretty good at managing how you enjoy it in ways that make customization dead simple. We started on an Echo show that was "in the kitchen" and asked Alexa to play "The song at the end of The Breakfast Club" in the Living Room (an Echo Studio). Then we asked it to switch the music to the living room (another Echo Studio on the other side of the demo space). Finally, the exec told Alexa Plus that he was going "to do some dishes, move it there," and Alexa Plus shifted the music to the Echo Show in the "kitchen." From accurately guessing "Don't You Forget About Me," to deftly moving the music around without all the specific details it usually takes, Alexa Plus AI-powered entertainment skills appear formidable. It was a series of impressive demos, but I do have questions about privacy and support for screenless Echos. Amazon has already confirmed that not every Echo ever made will support Alexa Plus (they'll still work with the original Alexa), but I do wonder what the experience will be like on smart speakers. The Ring integration is exciting, but you have to pay for that video feature. Otherwise, queries about activities over the last two weeks might come up with nothing. I am glad Amazon is including Alexa Plus in Amazon Prime. It's hard to imagine paying $19.99 a month for the privilege of using it. I also wonder just how much of Anthropic's Claude is at work here. Amazon called them a partner, but are we still talking to Alexa, or is this now Claude in Alexa Plus clothing? Even so, this is the change Alexa desperately needed, and I think it's safe to say that Amazon has officially entered the consumer AI race.

Alexa Plus explained: 9 things you need to know about Amazon's new AI-powered assistant

So, it's finally here - just over 11 years since Amazon's Alexa voice assistant sparked a new (and eventually underwhelming) age of voice assistants, it's just been given a major AI brain transplant. The new Alexa Plus is rolling out soon in the US, with international availability still unknown. But what exactly can Amazon's new voice assistant do, and will it actually be worth the monthly subscription (or signing up to Amazon Prime) to get early access? We've broken down everything you need to know about Alexa Plus below, from pricing to new features and what this all means for classic Alexa. Strangely, Amazon didn't announce any new Echo speakers at its big reveal today, but there was more than enough Alexa news for us to chew over - so let's dive into Alexa's biggest upgrade for over a decade... Since Alexa landed in 2014, we've seen the voice assistant get dozens of upgrades -from improvements to its listening powers to an ability to an ability to recognize individual voices. But it's no overstatement to say that Alexa Plus is its biggest by far - it's really a reinvention of the voice assistant. Powered by models from Anthropic (the maker of Claude) and Amazon's own Nova, Alexa Plus has an ability to remember personal information and context. Broadly speaking, Amazon used an orchestra conductor metaphor to explain the changes. As Amazon SVP of devices and services Panos Panay said: "The new Alexa knows almost every instrument in your life, your schedule, smart home, devices, and people you're connected to, and brings them together into what is an incredible symphony." We'll be the judges of that when we get to try it in the real world, but that won't be too long a wait (in the US, at least)... Judging by the early Alexa Plus demos, the best experience for the AI assistant will be on Amazon's latest smart displays. That's why the early access will be coming to the Echo Show 8, 10, 15 or 21 (whether you already own one, or buy one now). But it is fortunately also backwards compatible with most Echos from the last decade, except some of the very early ones. The only devices Alexa Plus doesn't work on are the Echo Dot 1st Gen, Echo 1st Gen, Echo Plus 1st Gen, Echo Tap, Echo Show 1st Gen, Echo Show 2nd Gen, and Echo Spot 1st Gen. You can also test-drive Alexa Plus in a web browser, the Alexa app and compatible Fire TV devices and Fire tablets. Unfortunately, Alexa Plus isn't available on devices that are branded "Alexa Built-in" (like headphones and smartwatches), but Amazon said it's hoping to bring the assistant to more devices "in the future". Alexa Plus will get an initial rollout in the US over "next few weeks" and will cost $19.99 per month - or will be free if you have a Prime subscription. Considering Prime currently costs $14.99 a month (or $139 annually) in the US, that means there's no reason not to get Prime. Which is clearly Amazon's plan. While Alexa Plus will apparently work on "almost every" Alexa device so far, the initial rollout will be on the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 from next month. If you buy one of those smart displays now, you'll get early access to Alexa Plus. Amazon sure does know how to trigger our impulse buy finger. Sadly, there's no news yet about an international rollout for Alexa Plus, but we'll update this page as soon as we hear anything official. Amazon wants Alexa Plus to be the glue that gets you using more of its devices -particularly the ones built for your smart home. If you have a Ring doorbell or security camera (plus a subscription), Alexa Plus can provide summaries of detected camera events and show you footage (for example, a package being delivered) on compatible Echo Show displays. This also integrates with Ring's Smart Video Search, letting you ask natural questions like "did someone take out the garbage bins?" or "when was the last time the dog went out for a walk"? Hopefully, the answer won't be "last week". But even if you only have an Echo Show or smart speaker, Alexa Plus promises to be a helpful (and much more conversational) voice assistant. You can move music from room to room (for example, "play the music upstairs") or create new smart home Routines by voice without delving into an app. If you have a Fire TV device, Alexa Plus will also play nicely with Prime Video - for example, letting you quickly jump to a particular scene that you've described. If you're prepared to share private information with Alexa Plus, like calendars and documents, then it can also act a bit like a family assistant. The calendar functionality certainly looks helpful - in a demo (below), Alexa was asked to recall the the dates of the presenter's daughter's soccer practices (from a previously shared document) and add the events to her calendar. There's seemingly no limit to the types of things you can upload, although it isn't yet clear what the ceiling is on the amount of uploads. Amazon says you can share emails, manuals, family recipes, study materials and more. Clearly, the more you share, the more you'll get out of Alexa Plus - and that's going to be a personal decision for many. Some examples included asking how much oil you need for your grandma's favorite zucchini bread, or simply "do I need to bring anything to the school fundraiser?" based on some emails you've shared. Amazon Echo speakers have become family favorites for many, so Amazon's used Alexa Plus to upgrade its Kids Plus subscription offerings - that costs $5.99 / £4.99 a month separately, but you'll get a one month free trial with Alexa Plus early access. Two features called "Stories with Alexa" and "Explore with Alexa" are designed to entertain your younglings and spark their creativity. A video showed a child chatting to Alexa and asking it questions - this was already possible, but Alexa Plus takes things up a notch with generative AI visuals and more. Naturally, it'll help if you have an Echo Show device with a screen, which is something that Amazon is using Alexa Plus to push us towards - if you buy a new Echo Show 8, 10, 15, or 21, you'll get early access to its new voice assistant. One of the biggest upgrades with Alexa Plus - and something that could push more people towards a Prime subscription - is its ability to remember information and personalize its responses. For example, it'll be able to offer personalized news briefings based on your specific interests (gadgets, obviously). Its ability to understand and remember your family's dietary preferences and allergies also sounds particularly handy if you like to use it for recipes and shopping. Not everything its built around voice interactions either. If you have an Echo Show smart display, you'll also seemingly be able to track topics like deal alerts or a fresh drop of tickets for your favorite artist. Inevitably, the more you share, the more functionality you'll unlock - so it could be a case of finding that sweet spot between helpful features and privacy. This is clearly just the start of Amazon's Alexa Plus ambitions - and the demos showed how much the tech giant wants it to plug into third-party services to make it your one-stop, conversational voice assistant. For starters, the connectivity will be fairly simple, like connecting to OpenTable to make a dinner reservation or booking an Uber for you while texting your friend to let them know your ETA. But looking ahead, Amazon wants Alexa Plus to let you conversationally create and tweak grocery lists on the fly, get them automatically edited based on your dietary requirements, and integrate closely with the likes of Grubhub and Whole Foods. In the not-too-distant future, Alexa Plus will also apparently work with specialized AI agents to help you life run smoothly in the background. We'll see how that all works in practice, but Alexa Plus could clearly become a big player in the world of AI voice assistants. Not everyone wants their voice assistant to get an AI brain transplant - and if all of this sounds a bit much, then the earlier version of Alexa will still be available on your older devices (for now, at least). Amazon would rather you upgraded to Alexa Plus, of course. It says "we're positive you'll love all that Alexa+ has to offer", but that "if you prefer using the original Alexa, it will remain available on your devices". That's good news if you prefer its simpler functionality, but we'd say the clock is now ticking on that old-school version of Alexa...

All your burning Alexa+ questions answered - by one of the people who built it

Daniel Rausch, Amazon VP Alexa & Echo at the Alexa+ unveiling. (Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff) Alexa just went from being a somewhat ordinary, if trusted, digital assistant to a powerful enigma. Alexa+ replaces the plodding of the original with conversational intelligence, proactivity, and true AI. It's a lot to take in and raises a lot of questions. I managed to get some answers from Daniel Rausch, Amazon's VP of Alexa and Echo and of the people who helped build Alexa Plus, to get some answers. Even though I caught up with Rausch at the end of a long day, he seemed energized and clearly quite proud of Amazon's creation. I started by asking him about something bugging me since the launch: How much of Alexa+ is Claude? Anthropic, Claude's developer, was touted as a partner in the development of Alexa Plus and listed during the presentation alongside Amazon Nova, Amazon's own large language model. Rausch, though, quickly disabused me of that notion. "You saw Amazon Nova models up there and they are definitely where we start at Amazon," Rausch began, "we always start with our own technology." Raushe explained that there is "unbelievable price performance in those models, unbelievable latency, unbelievable accuracy." It goes further than that, though. Rausch explained that Amazon's Bedrock is a sort of cloud-based foundation for all its generative AI work. Anthropic is a "really important partner," said Rausch, but the system Amazon's built is "model agnostic." "Bedrock's goal is to serve highly capable, state-of-the-art models," he said. That means the system will pick and choose the best models for the job. It makes sense this also may have been Rausch's way of not identifying which models, including Claude, are used when. "With Alexa," he added, "we have access to the full suite." It goes further than that, though. Large language models are not the end or destination. Rausch told me the Alexa+ experience extends and builds upon them. He discussed the "information experts" idea introduced during the launch event. The models use these experts to gather relevant and factual information. Rausch used the example of his constant queries about baseball, specifically the Yankees, but added that the system is smart enough to know that, in his house, only he likes to talk endlessly about baseball while his daughter has no interest. "I would say the models are helping orchestrate the overall experience and are the foundation and are helping us build the rest," Rausch told me. During the kids' section of the unveiling, or the part that described the new "Explore and Stories with Alexa," I noticed what looked like generative AI art. Rausch confirmed that Alexa+ generates that art on the fly based on kids' ideas. During development, Rausch put the tools in front of some relatives' kids to gauge their reactions: "It is super-fun. A kid is describing the story, Alexa is helping them explore, 'Hey, what would you like to write a story about?'" For instance, the kid describes a bearded dragon playing a saxophone. "Alexa's off drawing some creative artwork, asking about the path of the story, 'Where does the bearded dragon live?' or 'What city is the bearded dragon visiting?' Of course, kids are unlimited in their imagination. They're riffing. They're saying, sometimes, things adults can't come out with." It does sound like fun. I noticed that the images I saw looked like generative AI, and Rausch told me that was exactly what they were. He would not, however, reveal which generative image model Alexa+ is using. All Rausch would only say that "it's from the models on Bedrock." As with any generative AI, the key to Alexa+'s utility is data or rather your data. Generative tasks will be handled in the cloud, but Raush told me that all of it will be encrypted "in transit." "It is incredibly secure and meets our standard practices of trust generally, which include deep security and privacy," he added. Naturally, this led me to ask about the kids' technology and what safeguards Amazon has built around the generative image creation. Rausch described it as "incredibly safe," and said there are many safeguards in place to ensure "children are always kept safe." I know many companies say their generative image platforms are safe, but Amazon has a track record in developing kid-friendly platforms and systems. The "Explore and Stores with Alexa" is an extension of all that work. It was hard to ignore the pervasive use of the Echo Show 21 smart display throughout the Alexa+ demo. I've naturally been wondering about all the Echo Smart speakers out there, at least the ones new enough to support Alexa Plus. What will the experience be like with them? During the demos, Amazon actually cranked up the length of responses for the Echo 21 screens to show off what Alexa knows. But no one wants to stand around staring at a speaker waiting for these responses. Rausch told me that they designed Alexa Plus to deliver more concise responses on the speakers. All of this is customizable. "The idea is we picked the right kinds of responses and the right interactions for the device and the modality that you're in," he added. When Amazon delivers Alexa+ in March, that could mean millions of Echo owners suddenly having generative AI conversations with the newest chatbot on the block. It's potentially a big computational lift. Is Amazon ready? "Yes," Rausch smiled, "It is very nice to have AWS at Amazon." Amazon's massive cloud computing platform supports countless websites and services and will now supply the bandwidth for Alexa+. Still, it won't be everything, everywhere, all at once. Amazon is planning on rolling out Alexa+ in waves. And now I feel like I'll understand Alexa+ a little better when those waves first hit the digital shore.

Amazon's subscription-based Alexa+ looks highly capable -- and questionable

NEW YORK -- After teasing it in September 2023 and reportedly suffering delays, Amazon today announced that its more capable and conversational version of Alexa will start rolling out to US Prime members for free in the next few weeks. Those who aren't Prime subscribers will be able to get Alexa+ for $20 a month. Amazon didn't provide a specific release date but said availability would start with the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 smart displays. Amazon is hoping Alexa+ will be a lifeline for its fledgling voice assistant business that has failed to turn a profit. Alexa has reportedly cost Amazon tens of billions of dollars over the years. Although Alexa is on 600 million devices, per remarks CEO Andy Jassy made at a press conference on Wednesday, it's primarily used for simple tasks that don't generate much money, like checking the weather. Exacerbating the problem, generative AI chatbots are a new, shinier approach to AI assistants that have quickly outperformed what people could do with today's Alexa. By using the large language models (LLMs) available under the Amazon Bedrock service and technology from Anthropic, as well as Amazon Web Services, Amazon has re-architected Alexa to, per demos Ars saw today, be significantly more useful. From its demonstrated speech and ability to respond to casual language (that doesn't include saying the "Alexa" prompt repeatedly), to its ability to perform actions, like book dinner reservations or put appointments in your digital calendar, Alexa+ looks way more capable than the original Alexa. Alexa+ in action For example, Amazon representatives showed Alexa+ learning what a family member likes to eat and later recalling that information to recommend appropriate recipes. In another demo, Alexa+ appeared to set a price monitor for ticket availability on Ticketmaster. Alexa+ told the user it would notify them of price drops via their Echo or Alexa. I also saw Alexa+ identify, per the issued prompt, "that song Bradley Cooper sings. It's, like, in a duet" and stream it off of Amazon Music via Echo devices placed around the room. The user was able to toggle audio playing from Echo devices on the left or right side of the room. He then had Alexa+ quickly play the scene from the movie A Star Is Born (that the song is from) on a Fire TV. Notably, Alexa+ understood directions delivered in casual speak (for example: "can you just jump to the scene in the movie?"). During the demos, the Echo Show in use showed a transcription of the user and voice assistant's conversation on-screen. At times, I saw the transcription fix mistakes. For example, when a speaker said "I'm in New York," Alexa first heard "I'm imminent," but by the time the speaker was done talking, the transcribed prompt was corrected. I even saw Alexa+ use some logic. In one demo, a user requested tickets for Seattle Storm games in Seattle in March. Since there were none, Alexa+ asked if the user wanted to look for games in April. This showed Alexa+ anticipating a user's potential response, while increasing the chances that Amazon would be compensated for helping to drive a future ticket sale. Unlike with today's Alexa, Alexa+ is supposed to be able to interpret shared documents. An Amazon rep appeared to show Alexa+ reading a homeowner's association contract to determine if the user is allowed to install solar panels on their home. Although, as some have learned recently, there are inherent risks with relying on AI to provide totally accurate information about contracts, legal information, or, really anything. Alexa+ also aims to make navigating smart homes easier. For example, on stage, Panos Panay, Amazon's SVP of devices and services, asked Alexa+ if anyone took his dog out or brought a package to his house in the last couple of days. The AI was able to sift through Ring camera footage and relay the information (supposedly accurately) within seconds. Subscription Alexa has a new, friendlier tone, which I'd hope you can scale back for getting more direct, succinct information (I don't need a voice assistant telling me I have a "great idea!"). But ultimately, Alexa's agenda remains the same: get information about you and be a part of your purchasing process. A vast web of partnerships Making Alexa+ wasn't "as easy as taking an LLM and jacking it into the original Alexa," Daniel Rausch, VP of Amazon Alexa and Fire TV, said today. Alexa+ relies on a pile of partnerships to provide users with real-time information and the ability to complete tasks, like schedule someone from Thumbtack to come to the house to fix the sink. At launch, Alexa+ will work with "tens of thousands of other devices and services from our partners," said Rausch. He explained: Experts are groups of systems, capabilities, APIs, and instructions that accomplish specific tasks. So they bring together all the technology it takes to deliver on a customer's particular request. And building any single expert is actually super complicated. And having LLMs orchestrate across hundreds of them is definitely something that's never been done. Amazon trained Alexa+ to use partner APIs so that Alexa+ can work with and accomplish tasks with third-party services. Many of Amazon's partners don't have a full set of external APIs, though. In these cases, Alexa+ gathers information through what Amazon called "agentic capabilities," which is basically like having Alexa+ navigate the web on its own. Amazon also sees Alexa+ performing actions with third parties by having its LLM work with third-party LLMs. Developers can request previews of Alexa+'s three new SDKs as of today. Interestingly, Amazon's partners include over 200 publications, like Reuters, Forbes, Elle, and Ars Technica parent company Condé Nast. Based on Amazon's announcement and the need for Alexa+ to provide real-time information to maximize usefulness, it's likely that Amazon is relying on content licensing deals with these publishers and pulling in information via APIs and other tools. Training AI models on hundreds of publications would be expensive and time-consuming and would require frequent re-training. Amazon hasn't confirmed training deals with these publications. Commerce complications Alexa+ looks like it could potentially use AI in ways that most people haven't experienced before. However, there are obvious limitations. To start, it seems that users need to be working with one of Amazon's partners for the best experience. For example, Alexa+ can book a reservation for you at a restaurant -- but not if that restaurant isn't on OpenTable. In such cases, Alexa+ could, an Amazon representative said, provide you with the restaurant's phone number, which it will have taken from the web. But I wonder if Alexa+ will prioritize Amazon partners when it comes to showing results and providing information. Also, Amazon must still convince people that Alexa+ is a better way to buy and schedule things than your computer, phone, or even your (non-Fire) smart TV. Compared to the other types of gadgets vying to be the intermediary in our buying process, Alexa+ has serious disadvantages. For one, most Alexa users access the AI from a speaker. However, the voice assistant's advanced features look much easier to navigate and leverage fully with a screen, namely an Echo Show or Fire TV. I'd happily bet that there are many more people who want a laptop or phone than who want an Echo Show or Amazon TV. Other gadgets can also make it easier to dive deeper into tasks by enabling things like comparing products across competitors, understanding reviews, or marking critical parts of important documents. Amazon is using a clever approach to dealing with fatigue with subscriptions and, more specifically, subscription spending. By including Alexa+ with Prime, Prime members may feel like they're getting something extra for free, rather than suddenly paying for Alexa. For some who aren't subscribed to Prime, Alexa+ could be the extra nudge needed to get them to pay for Prime. For most non-Prime members, though, the idea of paying $20 per month for Alexa is laughable, especially if you only use Alexa through an Echo. And those with access to Alexa through a screen will still be challenged to change how they do things -- critically -- choosing to not rely on a technology and company with a checkered past around protecting customer privacy, including when it comes to Alexa and Amazon smart cameras. If Alexa+ works like the demos I saw today (which, of course, isn't a guarantee), Amazon will have succeeded in making AI gadgets that outperform expectations. Then, one of the biggest questions remaining will be: Who is willing to pay to have Amazon manage their schedules, smart homes, and purchases?

Amazon launches Alexa+, an AI-powered rebirth of its digital assistant

Table of Contents Table of Contents How can I access Alexa+? What's new with the Alexa+ assistant? A companion for everyone, and everything Going far deeper than Alexa ever could Amazon is finally pushing ahead into a new era of digital assistants with Alexa+, a next-gen version of Alexa that is powered by generative AI capabilities. It is more talkative with natural language capabilities, comes with a wide range of agentic chops, and can turn voice commands into routines, among a broad set of new capabilities. The AI upgrades for Alexa+ come courtesy of Amazon Nova and Anthropic Claude AI models. Amazon says the next-gen assistant will not only make the conversations sound more natural, but also rewarding. For example, it can remember the preferences and favorites of users. Recommended Videos Thanks to a memory system, similar to what Google Gemini got recently, it can recall those details when needed. Users can seamlessly carry their conversation with Alexa+ from an Echo speaker to their phone and end it on a connected interface in their car, all thanks to the contextual awareness and memory capabilities. How can I access Alexa+? Alexa+ will be free for Prime subscribers and will start rolling out to users in the US as an early access program starting next month. Alexa+ will be available via a new mobile app that will be available for Android and iOS devices. You can already sign up for early access here. Amazon is also launching a web client at Alexa.com that will offer access via a browser. If you don't have a Prime subscription, Amazon will charge you $19.99 for Alexa+ access. As far as hardware support goes, access will be limited to the Echo Show series of devices (8, 10, 15, and 21-inch models). Once you have any of these devices in your possession, Alexa+ will become available across all your Echo devices. There are, however, a few exceptions. Following is the list of non-eligible devices: Echo Dot 1st Gen Echo 1st Gen Echo Plus 1st Gen Echo Tap Echo Show 1st Gen Echo Show 2nd Gen Echo Spot 1st Gen What's new with the Alexa+ assistant? "The more you use Alexa+, the better your experience will get," says Amazon. A notable upgrade for the next-gen assistant is its ability to seamlessly perform tasks across different platforms, such as GrubHub, Yelp, Amazon, Apple Music, Netflix, and more. For example, you can ask the assistant to make a restaurant reservation and text your friend about it, as well. These agentic capabilities will essentially allow Alexa+ to perform tasks on a different company's website on behalf of users. If that sounds familiar, well, that's because OpenAI aims to pull off something similar with its Operator tool, but at a much higher cost than the premium Amazon is asking for Alexa+ access from non-Prime customers. It will fill up all the details across any third-party service, authenticate the user identity, and get the job done. Alexa+ will order groceries, play music from third-party platforms, book appointments, keep an eye on ticket sales, and catch up users on the Ring Camera activity across the day. You can just tell it to call a plumber, and it will do so after performing a web search and fixing a repair visit. Alexa+ can book an Uber, keep an eye on deals, find tickers, help with travel planning, and more -- all thanks to API integrations with partner brands and services. The company is also giving it more of an AI chatbot spin, allowing Alexa+ to pull information in real time from reliable sources such as Reuters, Associated Press, The Washington Post, among others. It can also generate images using text/voice prompts, and even create music, thanks to partnership with Suno. Taking a leaf out of the Google Gemini playbook (and the upcoming app intent system for Apple's Siri), Alexa+ will turn voice commands into actions as well as routines. For example, you can simply tell it to create an automation for controlling certain devices, and it will do so, without having users go through a complex app-based setup. A companion for everyone, and everything "Alexa+ is designed to take action, and is able to orchestrate across tens of thousands of services and devices -- which, to our knowledge, has never been done at this scale," says Amazon. In the realm of smart home control, Alexa+ is adding some notable new tricks. For example, users can tell it to keep the TV in their lobby ready and play a certain TV show while they are on their way. It can tap into the live footage from a Ring camera to tell if a package has been delivered, and seamlessly move music playback to any specified speaker in the house. Amazon is giving a big push to Alexa+ as a smarter companion for every member of the house. For example, the underlying large language model and deals with content partners allows it to offer solutions in the same way ChatGPT or Gemini answer your queries. "You can also add to her knowledge by sharing documents, emails, photos, and messages -- via a desktop browser, the mobile app, or even via email -- for Alexa to remember, summarize, or take action on," adds Amazon. Alexa is also getting file comprehension capabilities to compete with the products from Google and OpenAI. To that end, users can upload a ticket picture and have Alexa+ add it to their calendar by automatically gleaning all the necessary details from the ticket. Likewise, it can turn education material into interactive quizzes for children. It can also do the reverse and catch up users on their schedule by looking at their calendar entries. The new Alexa+ Daily Briefings feature offers a quick breakdown of all the trending events, while the For You widget notifies users about all their upcoming alerts and commitments. Just like Google's smart compose or Writing Tools in Apple Intelligence, Alexa+ can write original content while also letting users make the necessary modifications. Email and message summarization are part of the parcel, as well. Going far deeper than Alexa ever could Coming to the entertainment part, users can directly ask it questions such as "play the scene from a movie where Tom Hanks runs a marathon" and it will automatically launch and fast forward to that particular film scene. This capability has been deeply integrated at the heart of Amazon's Prime Video service. Alexa+ also gets a new natural language search feature that lets users search a specific photo and video in their gallery by simply describing it. For parents, there's a dedicated Alexa+ Kids experience that restricts certain activities for kids, such as voice-activated shopping and mature multimedia content. The next-gen assistant is also getting certain vision-based capabilities, as well. For example, via a camera, it can take a look at the groceries, and order what's needed or describe recipes based on what's available at hand. It ties into automation, too. Alexa+ can also recognize faces, or other items, and accordingly take actions. For example, users can just narrate a reminder such as "When you see the dog, inform me through the study room speaker." Amazon has taken the app out of the equation when it comes to routines. Users can simply narrate multi-step, multi-device control plans, and it will be converted into a routine automatically. There are also options for creating long-term personalised routines based on how the weather is, or progress within a week or month. Overall, Alexa+ sounds like a massive upgrade, one that focuses as much on next-gen AI-driven upgrades as it does on practical aspects of using a digital assistant to control a wide range of smart home devices. It's a cohesive approach, but one with a lot more granular controls that are just a sentence away from kicking into action.

7 genuinely useful Alexa Plus features that might make it my go-to AI assistant

Amazon has unveiled its new AI voice assistant. Welcome, Alexa Plus. (Image credit: Future) It's finally here; Alexa Plus has a name, an imminent rollout schedule, and a price tag of $19.99 (or free as part of an Amazon Prime membership.) Sure, we don't have any information on an international rollout, but having a tangible Alexa Plus service is enough good news for one day. There were few surprises in the demonstration; we've known since 2023 what Amazon ideally wanted its upskilled voice assistant to look like, and by and large, that's what was delivered, albeit later than initially hoped. We covered all the biggest news in our Alexa Plus live blog and summarized the key features and pricing information, but there's plenty that wasn't covered in depth at the event to unpack. Thankfully, Amazon has released a blog with all of the key features and functionalities in Alexa Plus, which outlines some more specific and quality-of-life adjustments that could make the subscription service all the more worth it. Many of the newly announced AI tools are on a par with other AI assistants; however, Alexa has one major feather in its cap. While much of its competition centers around your phone or laptop as the main interface, Alexa is housed around your home. As someone trying to use their phone less, not more, this puts Alexa as my personal front-runner as an AI assistant. I use Alexa daily to help me manage my household, and let me tell you, some of the incoming features are a must-have. Here are the features I'm most excited for. Personalization was a key theme of the day, with various demonstrations showing how Alexa Plus will be able to curate media to your personal needs. That comes in various forms, with Amazon's blog post highlighting a few. For me, the most exciting change is to Daily News briefings. Amazon says Alexa Plus can deliver personalized news briefings based on your interests, so if you chose tech, for example, you might get TechRadar's daily headlines served to you while you get ready in the morning. Elsewhere, Alexa is improving its personalization with music suggestions, building recommendations based on your mood, environment, and contextual information it knows about your preferences. This extends beyond voice control, too. For You, widgets can be set up to track specific topics in real-time, whether that's freshly released tickets to see your favorite artists or deal alerts for a product you've been pining for. Across the board, natural language processing improves Alexa Plus' ability to find exactly what you're looking for. Want to listen to a podcast, but specifically one that's under 20 minutes? Alexa Plus can help. Trying to find a specific song, but you can't remember anything except a few details and lyrics? Alexa Plus will bring the tunes. Sure, that's cool, but you know what's even cooler? You'll be able to ask Alexa Plus to find specific scenes in media and play them, meaning you'll never reach for that fast-forward button again when the time comes to re-watch your favorite movie action sequence. I've alluded to it already in this article, but Alexa will actually be able to track and notify you with news on specific subjects. Whether that's a live sports match or an artist you like who is prone to stealth-dropping albums and concerts. This feature is powered by what Amazon calls Experts, a collection of trusted sources - including TechRadar - which it collects information from to keep you informed. Apologies in advance if that means you have to hear more from me than you'd like. Generally, Alexa Plus offers some fantastic conversational upgrades, but nowhere will this be more crucial than in the smart home of tomorrow. Amazon talked a lot about how the new subscription service means "No more Alexa-speak," which basically means no more repeatedly attempting to prompt Alexa on something you know it can do - or just you think it should be able to do - to figure out the exact right way of asking for it. Device control is one of the most significant issues I have with standard Alexa, wherein the assistant will regularly decide it no longer likes the name I've given my devices. Similarly, it's frustrating that until now, simple commands like "Move Netflix to the Fire TV" when changing between rooms don't work; all those woes are history, it seems. Along a similar vein, Amazon has announced some much, much needed features for Alexa Plus when it comes to automations. Alexa Routines are a great starting position for newbies and those with minimal devices, but they rely heavily on the phone interface and offer little customization or conditional programming. Now, Amazon says Alexa Plus will not only allow you to create new Routines by voice, but the blog posts suggest you'll be able to build in conditional logic. For instance, if you're going on holiday for the week and need the lights to turn on at varying intervals to make it look like you're home, you can tell Alexa Plus, and it will deliver. You can even ask for daily outfit recommendations based on the weather, which I'll be using almost every day, so I stop sweating from stupidly wearing a heavy coat when it's actually moderately warm outside. These can also be personalized to a specific user, thanks to Vision ID and voice recognition technology. Thanks to a litany of third-party service integrations, Alexa Plus looks fit to take on some of the best AI assistants by offering agentic capabilities. Whether that's by booking a restaurant reservation, ordering a cab for a family member, or scheduling an appointment for household repairs, these hands-free interactions could free up hours of time spent on life admin. That's especially true for the grocery shopping feature, which is compatible with Amazon Fresh and other grocery delivery services. This feature won't be ready at release but will be sometime in the future. You'll be able to list everything from full recipes to scenarios like "We've got two guests coming on Friday, and one is a vegetarian," following which Alexa will populate a shopping basket with your preferred retailer. This isn't something I'd asked for, but I'm really excited to see how it pans out for Alexa Plus; the cameras built into your Echo Show devices just got a whole lot more useful thanks to its image analysis abilities. If, for example, a plant in your home is wilting and you can't figure out why, you can ask Alexa Plus to identify the plant, research it, and give suggestions for its care. Pretty neat. There's plenty more coming to Alexa Plus to make it an exciting proposition, though its $19.99 monthly subscription fee (which, as a reminder, is more expensive than the $14.99 monthly Amazon Prime membership, which will include Alexa Plus...) does feel disproportionate nonetheless. There are also some features inexplicably rolling out as Alexa Plus exclusive, where I see no reason for them not to be on the standard, free tier. For instance, the ability to send announcements to specific devices does not feel like something that necessitates AI and is something people have been asking for for a long time. The same goes for moving media from room to room. It should just work. While Amazon, I'm sure, is keen to recoup some of its $25bn smart home losses, feature-stuffing a subscription plan just isn't the way to engender long-term users to step up to a new subscription, nor do these small quality-of-life fixes really serve to add much value to this curiously positioned subscription service. A better message would be that "Alexa is better for everyone, but if you want the version that can really make your life better, then there's Alexa Plus."

Amazon Alexa Plus ... your money and data? There's one big question Amazon hasn't answered

There's one major shift in the way Amazon is approaching its next-gen Alexa, and it's got nothing to do with AI After more than a year of waiting, Amazon finally unveiled on Wednesday in New York City its next-generation Alexa voice assistant. It centers around large language models (LLMs) like the ones that power ChatGPT or Google's Gemini. With the power of an LLM -- which can understand and parse natural language and multistep commands -- Amazon's newly coined Alexa Plus seems to be able to do a lot more than its predecessor, which launched more than a decade ago. With Alexa Plus (Amazon is branding it "Alexa+"), you can use the AI in all sorts of new ways with your voice -- like change the music between rooms in your house, buy groceries, or even set your calendar. It also means something less exciting... It turns out all of that extra voice assistant goodness will come at a cost -- a real, dollar one. According to Amazon, Alexa Plus will cost $19.99 monthly if you aren't a Prime member. However, Prime members can use it for free -- for now, anyway. On the one hand, the move to paywall the new Alexa Plus features seems par for the course. Subscriptions for using more advanced features are already a known entity in the AI space, and there's no reason for Amazon to exempt itself from that. "Plus" or "+" is synonymous with "paid tier" when it comes to technology by this point. On the other hand, a paid-for Alexa is also an escalation. Voice assistants have long been a built-in feature of products. If you buy an iPhone, you get Siri; if you buy an Echo speaker, you get Alexa; if you pick up a Pixel phone or Google Smart speaker, you've got Google Assistant. Not once in that long line, however, has Apple, Amazon, or Google decided to turn their voice assistants into subscriptions. Even Apple, with its new Apple Intelligence-powered Siri on the horizon, hasn't signaled it will charge for those new AI features. Will Amazon's move to paywall Alexa Plus for non-Prime members set a precedent for future paywalled voice assistants? It's hard to say, but subscriptions are hard to put back in the bottle once they emerge as a revenue stream. According to Amazon, the good news is that, subscription or not, Alexa Plus isn't the voice assistant of yore. To justify its new paywall, Amazon offers a long list of uses that extend far beyond what was previously offered. A lot of those new capabilities are centered around added complexity. That means using Alexa not just for launching music or asking about the weather, but for things like navigating your smart home. With Alea Plus, Amazon says you can move music to rooms in your house, ask what Alexa sees on your Ring camera, or use more conversational language like "I'm chilly" to adjust the thermostat. It's not just complexity, though. It's also interoperability. Amazon is also positioning Alexa as an AI agent -- a trendy capability in AI that Google and Apple have also touted in recent months for their own AI services. So-called "agentic capabilities" can carry out tasks on your behalf. That could mean, for example, booking you an Uber, ordering you takeout, or even hiring a maid to come clean your house. In that way, Alexa Plus of isn't just a next-gen product -- it's not just a better way to get the weather -- it's a whole new one. And with that whole new list of capabilities comes a whole new can of worms. It's not just the paywall that could make Alexa controversial. It's the widening of its executive function. While giving Alexa access to your Ring camera could be helpful, applications like that -- and deeper integrations -- require a new level of trust. Voice assistants, including Amazon's Alexa, have already had their fair share of scandals. In 2018, Amazon, Apple, and Google all copped to using third parties to transcribe inputs from their voice assistants, which, as it turns out, accidentally captured all sorts of unsolicited sound bytes from people's homes. While each of those companies created some safeguards around this practice (making voice data collection opt-in, for example), the moment marked a significant shift in people's perceptions of voice assistants. A lot has changed since 2018 regarding how much people care about digital privacy, but an all-knowing Alexa is still a liability. Having voice inputs recorded and listened to without users' consent is bad enough, but imagine if that same scandal were to occur with the scope of Alexa Plus. Leaked personal information -- or even the appearance of having your information monitored by an entity you didn't reasonably expect -- gains more consequence when an AI has wider control over aspects of your life. Where you live, where you're going, what's on your calendar, or even visual information from your smart home are all on the table, if there aren't safeguards put in place. While no one is saying Amazon will collect or share that data, it's easy to see how one could find it difficult to believe they won't. Amazon will slowly roll out Alexa Plus starting next month, so we'll soon be able to test its next-generation capabilities for ourselves. Despite some obvious pitfalls, I'm optimistic. Voice assistants have long needed a boost, and LLMs could be just what the doctor ordered. That being said, I'd hate to see them get rolled into a subscription -- like everything else we use nowadays or, worse yet, compromise our privacy even further. And the good thing is, avoiding those two things does feel plausible. And if that means a more helpful voice assistant that can do more than just set timers or rattle off the weather, I'll be the first one in line to bark commands at the first Amazon speaker I can find. Either way, we're finally ready to discover what Amazon's next-gen Alexa can bring -- for better or worse.

Alexa gets smarter: Amazon turns command-taker into plan-maker with Alexa+ launch

Checking your privacy settings on your speaker gives you more control over the device. With a fresh infusion of personality, smarts and expertise, a new Alexa -- officially, Alexa+ -- is about to transform Amazon's smart home control center from simple command-taker to a perky and pleasant reservation-maker. But after more than a decade relegated to a corner of the kitchen turning off lights and turning on cooking timers, is Alexa really ready to take a more active role in our lives, handling complex tasks like ordering event tickets, adding kids' soccer games to the family calendar and finding a shop and scheduling repairs? More to the point, are we ready to hand over our phones, calendars and get-things-done apps like Grub Hub, OpenTable and Uber to Alexa+? And are we willing to pay for the privilege of a smart assistant at the controls? As for whether to pay, Amazon effectively kicked that can down the road at its reveal, at least for its 200 million Prime customers. That's because the $19.99 Alexa+ service will be bundled for free in the $14.99-a-month Prime service. At the reveal event, Amazon made a compelling case for Alexa+'s conversational capabilities. You don't have to worry about being precise. She -- Amazon insists Alexa+'s pronouns are she/her -- understands English. (More languages coming.) You can interrupt her. You can ask her follow-up questions. She will get you. Alexa+ is at its core generative AI technology. So consumers' tolerance may be tested by inevitable mistakes, misunderstandings and downright hallucinations. That said, the more Alexa+ learns about you and understands what you do and what you like, the better the service will get. After watching you turn on the living room lights shortly before sunset each day, for example, Alexa+ will offer to automate that. And once the system understands your preferences, it will automatically add your brand of pasta to a grocery order. And of course, the more apps Amazon signs on as partners, the more likely Alexa+ will be able take over and do what you ask. Prospects for Alexa+ Amazon isn't the only voice assistance platform that is getting an AI infusion. Google and Apple have each upgraded their platforms. And while Alexa may not be the go-to assistant on smartphones, it is far-and-away the in-home voice assist leader -- and a leading smart home controller as well. For Alexa, the upgrade in smart home control alone could be a huge benefit for millions. Because rather than opening the phone app and naming every smart light and every room in the house, you can just ask Alexa+ to set it all up. Unlike Apple and Google, which brag about how much of their chatbot is handled on-device, Amazon really isn't in a position to do that. Not yet. The reason: the existing Alexa devices you might have in your home aren't built for it. That likely will change with new Amazon Echo devices coming available later this year and beyond. For now, though, Alexa+ will reside in the cloud. While that should lead to better answers -- there's a lot more horsepower in the cloud than there could ever be in an Echo -- it may also be challenging to respond quickly. Bottom line "Until right this moment, we have been limited by the technology," Panos Panay, who heads the Devices & Services unit at Amazon, told the event crowd. "Every once in a while a technology comes around and it changes literally everything." The new Amazon Alexa+ certainly has the potential to be that technology. Based on the limited view we've had thus far, the platform seems to have the personality, the smarts, the contextual awareness and the framework for new capabilities to make itself really useful. Even vital. Will we give it that chance? We'll see. Consumers can be brutally impatient with new technology. Remember, it was our low tolerance that put Alexa in the corner at the outset. Is Alexa+ good enough to cut through our frustration-in-waiting? That will be the real test for the platform's personality and contextual prowess. I look forward to finding out.

Amazon's new AI-powered Alexa+ is a lot more fun to talk to than ChatGPT or Siri, and I like it

Now we know that an AI-powered Alexa+ is coming to your Amazon device very soon (assuming you live in the US of course - international release dates are still to be confirmed), we can welcome Amazon back to the virtual assistant race with open arms. Alexa, where have you been? Despite leading the charge on virtual assistants way back in 2014, Alexa effectively dropped out of the development race for a year or two there while Silicon Valley's young AI upstarts, like ChatGPT and Gemini, took over the virtual assistant space. While they were adding voice modes and starting to interact with our calendars and inboxes, Alexa was still stuck as being nothing more than a glorified egg timer that could talk. It's not like Amazon's main virtual assistant competitor, Apple's Siri, has really done anything to take advantage of the stall in Alexa's development. Apple was equally wrong footed by the AI equivalent of the Cambrian explosion, but at least Apple has made some attempt to get into the AI wars with Apple Intelligence, even if it seems to be endlessly playing catch-up, tied to a yearly release schedule when the rest of the AI market was simply reinventing itself every three months. But now Alexa is back, and it's got a bit of an attitude. One thing I noticed about yesterday's Alexa+ demo from Amazon was that the presenters, like Amazon Devices lead Panos Panay, frequently referred to Alexa as "her", and there was absolutely no mention of changing Alexa to a different voice, or even changing "her" gender. (I still find it weird to call an AI either "he" or "she", so I'm sticking with "it" in this article. Don't cancel me, please.) In contrast, when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode, adding a realistic voice for the first time to ChatGPT, it put a lot of effort into showing off all the different voices you could get it to use, half of which are male and half of which are female. Apple's Siri is also very cosmopolitan. It can talk in multiple accents and offers a choice between male and female voices. To be clear, I think it's unlikely that Amazon won't offer a way to customize the voice of Alexa+ - you can get the current Alexa to change voices by simply saying "Change voice" - but Amazon is clearly trying to present Alexa in a more personal and human way than the other big tech companies have so far with their talking AIs. Not only does Amazon refer to Alexa as "her" but she (damnit, see how easy it is to start thinking of Alexa as a person?) has much more of a personality than the responses you get from ChatGPT, Siri and Gemini. Alexa even makes jokes and throws in funny comments. In the videos of the demo of Alexa+ you can see that she (OK, I give in) sounds light, breezy and fun to talk to: Incidentally, talking of changing Alexa voices, Amazon used to offer celebrity voices for Alexa as downloads. The US-only feature cost $4.99 each for Samuel L Jackson, Shaquille O-Neal and Melissa McCarthy, but the company pulled them all in 2023. I would love to have been able to talk to a Samuel L Jackson version of Alexa+ with this enlarged range of responses and attitude. Can you imagine how cool it would be if Samuel L Jackson Alexa+ could channel some of the energy from his movie roles into your Alexa device? Jules Winnfield from Pulp Fiction telling me what's on my calendar today and that yes, "I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers", would pump start my day in a way that no amount of caffeine could ever match. In contrast, talking to ChatGPT or Siri at the moment lacks the same sort of emotional spark that even basic Alexa+ has. They are functional, yes, but not as fun as the direction Amazon is taking Alexa+. By making an AI chatbot with a bit of personality Amazon might have just found a niche that means it can recover from its slow start in the AI arms race. Not to mention that Alexa+ is designed primarily to be on a device that sits in your home, not on a phone in your pocket or a computer at your desk. While that might not be much of a technical difference, the difference in the way you use Alexa+ means you're in a different location, at a different distance, and ultimately in a different frame of mind when you use it. Nobody is expecting Alexa+ to be able to produce C++ code, for example. Alexa+ is simply there for all the fun things in life like playing music, watching movies and reading your kids a story. Sure, it can do clever things like book a meal at your favorite restaurant and organize your diary, too, but while Apple or OpenAI are going to own the AI in your pocket or at work, it's looking like Amazon is going to own the AI in your home. I just wish it would bring back the custom voices, so Alexa+ can truly be his or her brother's keeper.

A smarter Alexa? Sign me up

Table of Contents Table of Contents From gimmick to magic Not keeping up An actually intelligent assistant To say that folks have misgivings about AI is probably an understatement. From long-term fears over what the technology might do as it acquires more power and more capability, to the immediate concerns of those in creative roles who see themselves as unpaid trainers of AI models (and their first professional victims), there is no shortage of legitimate criticisms. And as someone who writes words for a living, I'm painfully and frighteningly aware that AI represents a clear and present danger to my income. But if my smart speakers can finally turn into something more useful than a voice-activated egg timer -- as Amazon has promised with its new AI-driven Alexa+ -- I consider that a silver lining to the oncoming AI apocalypse, not something to be avoided. Recommended Videos From gimmick to magic Like a lot of you, I was less than blown away by Siri when Apple debuted its voice assistant on the iPhone 4S. There was a novelty to it, for sure, and I know some folks who, to this day get genuine utility from being able to create reminders, respond to text messages, and place calls with their voice. But as someone who seldom drives (and who would rather die than be overheard barking commands into their phone in public), Siri felt like a gimmick. When Amazon introduced its first Echo smart speaker, however, I was immediately taken in. The quality of Alexa's simulated voice, the variety of things I could ask, the fact that it could tie into a bunch of smart home devices that I didn't yet own (but someday surely would) ... it felt magical in the way that only really clever technology can be. Google Assistant -- via the first-gen Google Home speaker -- had its own charms, especially if you were a very googly person. Not keeping up And yet, as the years passed, and I added more of these devices to our home -- including Sonos smart speakers that could run either Alexa or Google Assistant -- I became increasingly aware of their shortcomings. The magic of controlling my lights or thermostat with my voice eventually stopped feeling so magical after the hundredth time, while simultaneously, my frustration grew as these voice assistants couldn't keep pace with my desire for more and better responses. It's handy, when watching a movie, to ask, "Hey Google, how old is Paul Rudd?" and get instant access to that information "Paul Rudd is 55 years old." But throwing in even a tiny bit of extra complexity can bring these voice assistants to their knees: "Hey Google, how old was Paul Rudd when he was in This Is 40?" "I'm sorry, I don't understand." Or worse, as Alexa demonstrated: "From thecinemaholic.com, how the 26-year old Paul Rudd pulled off a seemingly innocent and novice 18-year-old Josh is beyond my comprehension." That's a reference to Rudd's 1995 turn as Josh in Clueless, by the way. An actually intelligent assistant Meanwhile, ChatGPT barely broke a sweat during the two seconds it took to generate this reply, "Paul Rudd was born on April 6, 1969, and This Is 40 was released in December 2012. That means he was 43 years old when the movie came out, but he was likely 41 or 42 during filming, depending on the exact shooting schedule." Oh and just as an added flex, if I follow that up with related questions, like "Who played his wife in that movie?" and, "how old was she when she played that role?" I think you already know how that went. Needless to say, these are among the most mundane things you could ask an assistant (dear Paul, I'm not calling you mundane; you are awesome), but they're already orders of magnitude more complicated than any of our current smart speakers can handle and that feels wrong. How can a voice assistant ever truly assist you, if it doesn't understand you? Does greater risk to our privacy come with greater AI capabilities? Possibly. OK, probably. But anyone who already has one of these devices in their home has already (perhaps naively) accepted that risk. If you fear that your smart speakers are eavesdropping on every conversation and then whispering those details in Jeff Bezos' digital ears, you may be right -- but then why do you have these devices in the first place? For me, and I'm fairly certain for my family members, the privacy risk/reward tradeoff with so-called "smart" technology is one I'm willing to make -- with one major caveat: the reward needs to feel like a reward. If Alexa+ can bring back the magic, it will once again feel like a tradeoff worth making.

Alexa+: 5 things that impressed me, and 2 that didn't | Stuff

I'm at the Alexa+ launch in New York, where Amazon has just pulled back the curtain on its next-generation AI assistant. It's an event I was very much looking forward to, because for years, voice assistants have been useful but limited, often feeling more like voice-controlled search engines than true AI companions. However, with Alexa+, Amazon is promising something different: a smarter, more conversational assistant that can manage complex tasks and integrate more deeply with your digital life. At its core, Alexa+ is powered by generative AI, giving it a more natural and context-aware approach to interactions. It can understand open-ended requests, recall information from previous conversations, and take proactive actions like managing your schedule, summarizing emails, and even helping with grocery shopping. But does it live up to the hype? I spent time testing Alexa+ at the event, and while some features are genuinely game-changing, a few things still need work. Here are five things that really impressed me - and two that didn't. Forget reading off a list of individual items - Alexa+ now lets you build a grocery list in a natural, stream-of-consciousness way. You can say, "I'm thinking of making tacos this week," and Alexa+ will suggest ingredients based on your past preferences. It can even integrate with Whole Foods and Grubhub to place orders. If you have security cameras, smart locks, or motion sensors, Alexa+ can now provide a daily summary of what's happening around your home. Instead of scrolling through endless notifications, just ask, "What happened while I was out?" and it'll highlight key events - like when a package was delivered or if the dog walker arrived. Music discovery with Alexa has always been hit-or-miss, but Alexa+ improves on this with casual conversation. You can ask, "What's a good upbeat playlist for working out?" or even hum a song, and Alexa+ will provide recommendations. It also integrates with streaming services to help you find new podcasts or audiobooks. Just finished binge-watching a TV series? Alexa+ can suggest something to watch next. Setting up smart home automations used to require digging through the Alexa app and tweaking multiple settings. Now, you can just say, "Alexa, turn off the lights when I leave and start the robot vacuum," and it'll create a Routine on the fly. This makes automation far more accessible for casual users. Alexa+ takes calendar management to the next level by pulling details from documents and emails. Need to check if you have a school event coming up? Just forward the school's newsletter to Alexa, and it'll extract the relevant dates. It can even summarise key details from long emails, saving you time. In some demos, Alexa+ would respond with a long-winded paragraph when a single sentence would have sufficed. If I ask, "What is the song that plays at the end of Breakfast Club?" I don't need a full breakdown of the song - just the title and artist. Hopefully, Amazon will refine this over time. Alexa+ will start rolling out in the U.S. within weeks, with Prime members getting it for free (otherwise, it's $19.99 per month). But there's no word on a UK launch, which is frustrating given how many UK households use Alexa. I can;t wait to start using Alexa+.