Amazon is finally releasing the long-awaited generative AI version of Alexa, Alexa Plus, which, if all goes well, would eliminate most of the friction associated with talking to a speaker to operate your smart home or obtain information on the fly.
Some of the new features coming to Alexa Plus include the ability to do things for you, such as ordering groceries or sending event invitations to friends. Amazon says it will also be able to memorize personal details like your diet and movie preferences.
Alexa Plus is $19.99 per month on its own or free for Amazon Prime members – a better deal than Prime, which costs $14.99 per month or $139 per year. That includes access to the Alexa website, where the corporation claims users may undertake "long-form work." Amazon also stated that it developed a new Alexa app to accompany the new assistant. Alexa Plus will function on "almost every" Alexa device produced to date, beginning with the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21. Anyone in early access will receive the new system for free, which will begin to roll out next month.
Alexa Plus will also be able to carry on conversations after saying its wake word, which is still simply "Alexa." It also has vision capabilities and can capture and analyze images. Amazon demonstrated other capabilities, such as Alexa urging you to inquire about concert ticket availability, informing you about area companies (using Yelp to do so), and booking dinner reservations. The startup claims it can read a study guide and quiz you on the answers, as well as research trips and plan itineraries.
Like before, you can still operate smart home devices, with Amazon pointing out things like smart home cameras and lights, but the business says it can build routines on your behalf as well. Alexa Plus can also be used for music, and it can identify songs based on ambiguous descriptions. Although it took a few tries in the demo, the company also claimed that you could ask Alexa to jump to a particular scene in a movie.
In one segment of the demo, Amazon SVP of devices and services Panos Panay asked Alexa if anyone had recently walked the dog, and the voice assistant responded that, yes, someone had, citing smart home cameras. What Amazon demonstrated was far beyond what could be done with the older version of Alexa.
You may exchange documents with Alexa, including handwritten notes and recipes, emails, instruction manuals, and photos, which it can refer to at a later time, as demonstrated by Mara Segal, director of Alexa at Amazon. Segal, for example, requested Alexa to read and evaluate a housing association document that contained guidelines about solar panels. Additionally, she requested a rundown of the SXSW itinerary.
Using pretty informal, natural language in a continuous discussion, Segal showed how Alexa Plus can respond to prompts by informing her about a child's soccer schedule and adding calendar information and reminders based on it.
A lot of the showcased Alexa Plus features were visual, suggesting that the dashboard and UI on touchscreen Echo devices have gotten a facelift. A whole new widget designed especially for controlling linked smart home devices has been added to the home screen, along with new configurable widgets that can be relocated to a second page.
On Echo devices with a display, you will also see a changing blue bar at the bottom of the interface while interacting with the new Alexa Plus. Panay said this “is Alexa” and that the little movements and icons it shows are called “Alexicons,” which are designed to visually communicate a feeling of personality.
The business demonstrated several known LLM greatest hits, like the ability to have Alexa Plus create stories for you and appear to be capable of producing AI art.
Amazon stated that Alexa Plus is a model-agnostic system that uses both its own Amazon Nova model and others from companies such as Anthropic. It will select the optimum model for the work at hand, according to the business.
Amazon also highlighted a variety of partners from whom Alexa Plus obtains data to better understand and evaluate financial markets, sports, and other topics. The partners include The Associated Press, Politico, The Washington Post, and Reuters.
The company proved this by asking Alexa questions about the Boston Red Sox and tracking ticket availability over time. Alexa Plus will supposedly be able to purchase those tickets for you. The company claims that these are day-one capabilities, powered by hundreds of models it refers to as "experts."
According to Amazon, its LLM specialists can also handle services from companies like Ticketmaster, Grubhub, Levoit, Uber Eats, Sonos, Wyze, Zoom, Xbox, Plex, Dyson, and Bose. Additionally, it mentioned that Alexa.com will offer some of the Alexa Plus features online.
The business is also collaborating with Suno, an AI song generator, to enable Alexa Plus to compose songs spontaneously in response to prompts. As an example, the company has produced a country song about a bodega cat.
In September 2023, Amazon originally declared that it would "supercharge" Alexa with AI. The business made a lot of lofty claims back then, claiming that you only needed to ask Alexa to grasp context or create automatic processes for you. However, allegations surfaced that the corporation was having trouble implementing its efforts and that some staff were quitting because they didn't believe this version of Alexa would ever operate by the following June, around the time Apple introduced its own Siri AI upgrade.
In the interim, Amazon's devices team also had a significant executive shuffle, with Panay, a former Microsoft Surface lineup leader, taking over for longtime leader Dave Limp.
Amazon is entering a world that is quite different from the one Alexa was born into in 2014, now that its AI Alexa is here. It will face competition from a wide field of AI-powered digital assistants, such as Apple's supposedly struggling updated Siri, the category-defining ChatGPT, and the way-ahead Google Gemini. Amazon may have a chance because, with very few exceptions, those chatbots aren't yet available on smart speakers. Its presenters could introduce an AI chatbot to a large audience much more quickly than rivals. Amazon only needs to complete shipping it.
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