Amazon Alexa+, a premium version of its Alexa voice assistant, has exited its one-year early-access program and is now available in its long-awaited full-scale release. Even though the early access program was fairly open, it remained a wide-open public beta, with Amazon using these early users to discover and fix bugs and round off the edges of the user experience ahead of the full release.
Alexa+ is a much smarter version of Alexa that uses—you guessed it—AI to field more complex requests and commands. Namely, it’s built on the architectures of both Amazon Nova and Anthropic (the maker of Claude).
Everything You Need to Know About Alexa+
Alexa+ is included for free with Prime, which I imagine will make up nearly all Alexa+ users. Those without Prime can subscribe to Alexa+ for $20 per month.
It makes no sense to me. A Prime membership costs $15 per month, so it’s cheaper to sign up for Prime and get all the other benefits (Prime Video, exclusive deals, and so on), along with Alexa+.
There’s a free tier for non-Prime subscribers, but it’s only available in the Alexa app and on Alexa.com, which makes it mildly inconvenient compared to the full experience available across the Alexa family of products, from Echo smart home hubs to Fire TVs.
Of course, that’s probably Amazon’s aim. It wants to convert the entire world to Prime subscribers, a scheme of world domination to hook you into the Amazon ecosystem and never let go.
Subscribe to one Amazon product? Why would you ever want to do that when it’d be so much easier to cancel once the appeal of that one product has worn off, rather than get so used to a bevy of services that you stay forever? Forever, forever, forever…
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