If you’ve had it up to here with dumb responses from Alexa, get ready for a big change.
At a glitzy event in New York City on Wednesday, Amazon unveiled–again–its AI-enhanced and “completely re-architectured” Alexa, and we’ll all soon have a chance to kick the tires ourselves.
Starting next month, Amazon will kick off a public preview for the new Alexa, which it’s calling Alexa+. The public preview will begin gradually, with more users gradually being added to the group.
This news is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart speakers.
The revamped Alexa will indeed cost extra: think $19.99 a month, in line with paid “plus” memberships for ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude. That said, Alexa+ will be free for Amazon Prime members. Amazon has previously promised that “classic” Alexa would remain available for free, but there was no mention of that during today’s presentation.
Ben Patterson/Foundry
The new AI-enhanced Alexa (which will offer new phone and web apps) will have a variety of tricks up its sleeve, including “agentic” abilities (autonomous AI is the new hotness in artificial intelligence). For example, Amazon says Alexa+ will be able to go shopping, book travel tickets, text contacts, suggest recipes, and fine-tune your smart home routines, weaving all those tasks within a single interaction.
Most importantly, the revamped Alexa will be able to “reason and take action,” such as following up on conversations to set reminders.
During a demo, Amazon devices head Panos Panay chatted with Alexa+, carrying on an animated conversation reminiscent of ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode.
The new Alexa also showed off its multimodal capabilities by “looking” at a live video feed of the assembled audience at the presentation, and then describing the scene, the size of the crowd, and the “wowed” reaction.
Panay said Alexa+ will be able to create routines based on natural language prompts. He also showed how the new Alexa could pluck the music track “Shallow,” from the A Star is Born soundtrack, off Amazon Music in response to a vaguely worded query, and then asked Alexa to “jump to that scene” in the movie streamed on Amazon Prime Video. (It worked.)
Showing off a new Alexa Ring integration, Panay asked Alexa+ “what’s happening at my house,” and Alexa promptly put up a live feed of a Ring security camera on the screen, accurately describing it what was happening. Other notable smart home and home entertainment integrations include Wyze, iRobot, Govee, Shark, Sonos, and Vizio.
With Alexa+, “there’s no more Alexa speak,” Panay promised.
We also got a peek at the Alexa+ user interface, including a new “expressive” blue animation that will replace the classic Alexa blue line) that changes shape as you talk.
Other features including the ability to share lengthy documents with Alexa+, which the AI can remember, analyze, and summarize. (Experienced LLM users will be familiar with such “RAG” functionality.) The new Alexa can also do things like add calendar events based on information in the files shared with it.
Amazon also promised new Alexa+ features for children, showing a video of the new assistant telling on-the-fly stories and otherwise engaging with the tykes. We also saw Alexa+ answering questions about sports and other current events.
Ben Patterson/Foundry
Daniel Rausch, vice president of Amazon’s Alexa and Echo divisions, explained how Alexa+ is powered using a mixture of models from Amazon and Anthropic. Alexa+ can also switch models in the background depending on the task at hand, Rausch said.
We’ll still getting the scoop on Alexa’s new AI-infused abilities, so stand by for more details on that score; plus, my hands-on impressions.
Amazon first showed off the new Alexa during its September 2023 hardware event, and at the time it promised a public preview “early” in 2024.
Instead, the year came and went without a public beta for the revamped Alexa. What we did get were insider accounts of a hallucination-prone Alexa that gave lengthy and frequently inaccurate answers, while also having trouble with basic smart home capabilities.
Of course, those AI-related troubles aren’t unique to Amazon. Google has taken a careful approach when it comes to allowing Gemini to interact with smart devices, while Apple has yet to open its Home app to Apple Intelligence.