We’ve been waiting a long time to see what Amazon was doing with its digital assistant. Alexa+ got all the fanfare today at an Amazon event. SVP of devices and services Panos Panay, formerly of Microsoft, debuted the next-generation edition of the shopping giant’s AI bot. Amazon hopes you’ll prefer Alexa+ over the other digital assistants in your home.
Alexa+ promises all sorts of new interactions, many of which might seem like repeat offerings if you’ve already been living with this stuff in your home. After mentioning the wake word, you can converse with Alexa+ as you would with a friend, asking about the weather and then going into a conversation about what’s on the docket for the day. You could even ask it something contextual, like whether it saw any animals creep by on the Ring security cameras in the middle of the night. It’s all contingent on what you program into it beforehand, but the possibility exists, and the company wants you to think of your shopping app to interact with first before you go to the search giant. Amazon also showed off Alexa helping you get tickets to a show and fetching the ratings on local businesses.
Alexa+ still functions like before. It can turn the lights on and off, create routines on your behalf, and play music and other media. You can even ask it to help you recollect a song based on bits and pieces of it. Then, when it’s working time, Amazon showed Alexa’s ability to scan and understand handwritten grocery lists and instruction manuals.
Amazon is attempting to steer you away from its competition, namely Google. We’ve been waiting for this major rebrand since late 2023 when Amazon teased us that something new was coming. But nothing came for a while, and since then, Google has launched more iterations of its Gemini AI, though it’s still working out the kinks in its product. Apple has gone full in on Apple Intelligence, which has helped supercharge Siri, as it seemed lackluster compared to Alexa and Google.
Here’s the thing about all this new stuff: While it will work with most of the Amazon devices that are out now—namely the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and the whopping Echo Show 21, which is a 21-inch screen meant for the shared space in your home—it will cost you. Alexa+ costs $20/month. It’s free for Amazon Prime members, so you should be covered if you already get all your shopping and entertainment through Amazon. But an Alexa that can do this much will cost you one way or another.