Amazon announces new AI-powered Alexa+ chat assistant

Amazon has announced a new generative AI powered update for their Alexa chat assistant overnight. Called Alexa+, the new assistant will be ‘more conversational, smarter, personalised, and gets things done’.

Alexa+ can still do all the things you already know and love about Alexa, playing music, answering querstions, controlling your smart home and more, however Alexa+ is more proactive and will improve with experience as you interact with it.

Alexa+ can learn things like your family recipes, important dates, facts, dietary preferences, and more, and then implement that knowledge into interactions – say, suggesting a family recipe for dinner one night, or reminding you of a dietary restriction.

The new version of Alexa will integrate with more services that you use in daily life, making it easier for Alexa+ to get things done in the background. To make this easier, Amazon has worked with several vendors including Ticketmaster, Yelp and OpenTable. Alexa+ will also interact with your smart home devices from the likes of Roborock, Phillips Hue and more. Alexa+ also has an intelligent agent component that Amazon says will be able to navigate the web to get things done.

While you can access Alexa on a wide variety of devices, Amazon is going to make Alexa+ more accessible. There’s going to be a new mobile app for Android and iOS, and there’s a new web portal opening at Alexa.com. Amazon says you can share documents, emails, photos, and messages through a desktop browser, the mobile app, or even via email – which Alexa+ can then take action on.

Accessing Alexa+ everywhere is important to Amazon, so you can talk across devices, starting a conversation on your Echo speaker before moving off on your phone and then into the car – with Alexa+ remembering the context of your conversation.

As with all these AI Assistants, Alexa+ isn’t free…unless you’re a Prime member. Amazon says Alexa+ will cost $19.99 USD per month (around $32 AUD), but all Amazon Prime members will get access to it for free.

Alexa+ is not launching immediately, and it will initially be US-only. Amazopn says that Alexa+ will start rolling out in the U.S. in the next few weeks for early access, with invite waves rolliung out. Amazon says they’ll be targetting owners of the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 for the early access period – but you’ll be able to try it out on most devices when it launches more broadly.