On Tuesday, top executives from Amazon took the stage at Spring Studios in New York City to share updates on the company’s devices and services. Unsurprisingly, those updates centered around artificial intelligence and all the ways that Amazon is integrating generative AI into Alexa and its Alexa-enabled smart devices.
No new devices were announced at the event, but Amazon did give us a deep dive into Alexa+, which looks like the company’s answer to ChatGPT and Gemini.
Alexa+ brings AI to Amazon’s assistant
Amazon’s new Devices & Services Senior Vice President Panos Panay took the stage to show off Alexa+, an upgraded version of the company’s virtual assistant, now powered by generative AI. Some of the ways Alexa+ improves upon Alexa include its ability to understand context and meaning, its ability to act on your behalf to plan events or book travel, and the fact that it starts becoming more personalized the more you interact with it.
Alexa+ will continue to be available on all of your Echo devices and the Alexa mobile app, but it will also be accessible via a new web browser experience.
How Alexa+ transforms your smart home
In order to demonstrate Alexa+’s new abilities, Amazon unveiled a redesigned user interface on Echo Show. The UI includes an adaptive display that automatically transitions from your photos and personalized content to a customized home screen as you approach.
Beyond the UI, Alexa+ enables new functionality on all of Amazon’s Alexa-enabled devices. For example, you can set up complex new Routines by voice, ask Alexa+ to play the latest trending pop song, tell the assistant to move music to different rooms in your house, and request to jump to specific scenes in shows and movies. You can also use Alexa+ and your Ring subscription to get a summary of what’s been happening around your house.
Here are a few more features coming to your smart devices courtesy of Alexa+:
- You can share documents with Alexa+ to let it extract and recall relevant information that it can use to provide summaries and add events to your calendar.
- “Stories with Alexa” and “Explore with Alexa” are coming to Amazon Kids+.
- By connecting to hundreds of APIs, Alexa+ can coordinate multiple services, letting it make a reservation, call an Uber, and text your contacts about your plans all at once.
Alexa+ will also soon give customers the ability to “conversationally create and edit grocery lists on the fly, revise a list based on dietary preferences, and add ingredients to an Amazon Fresh order.” These features will integrate with Whole Foods, Grubhub, and more.
Pricing and launch details
Prime members will have access to Alexa+ for free, but everyone else will have to pay $19.99 a month to use the AI-powered version of Amazon’s virtual assistant.
Amazon says that Alexa+ will start rolling out in the U.S. in the next few weeks. The upgrade will come in waves, but households with Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 smart displays will be among the first to get early access to the new assistant.
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