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On Wednesday, Amazon revealed to the world that the long-awaited AI-powered upgrade to its Alexa voice assistant is almost ready for primetime.
Alexa+ drops for certain early-access customers starting in March for the standalone price of $19.99/mo or for free with an Amazon Prime subscription. Crucially, any Alexa-enabled device you already own can run Alexa+, and that list will soon include web browsers and a new phone app.
The event where Amazon announced Alexa+ was not livestreamed to the public, but I got a chance to attend and see the new chatbot in action in limited hands-on demos. Here are five new features that stood out to me.
5 things Amazon Alexa+ can do for you
It would be easier to list the things Alexa+ can’t do, but that’s not as fun.
Hold a conversation
By far, the most noteworthy thing about Alexa+ is how easy it seems to talk to. Anyone who has used an older-style chatbot like the previous version of Alexa or Siri knows that you have to alter your way of speaking most of the time to get what you want. You typically can’t talk to these things like you would talk to another person, or else they get confused.
That doesn’t seem to be the case with Alexa+, at least based on the demos I saw. It’s remarkably conversational, able to sift through a somewhat rambling voice prompt and find the relevant info it needs to complete a request…most of the time. I saw Alexa+ give a public speaking pep talk on how to present a new tech product to 250 journalists, offer analysis of the Boston Red Sox offseason, and even remember dietary preferences and restrictions for someone in the user’s contacts.
I paid close attention to how Alexa+ receives voice prompts, and what stood out to me the most was that even if it got a name, word, or phrase wrong, it was almost always still able to logically respond to the prompt in question.
Draft and send messages to people
Amazon focused heavily on agentic AI features for Alexa+, including the ability to draft and send text messages and emails to contacts. This is not especially new or revolutionary given the recent agentic AI explosion in the tech world, but it’s still worth talking about.
At the presentation, Amazon was quick to point out that tons of third-party apps, like Uber, work with Alexa+. As an example, a live stage demo was conducted where the presenter was able to make a restaurant reservation, arrange an Uber ride from the airport to the restaurant for someone he was planning to meet, and then send a text message with details about the reservation and Uber ride to the person in question. Of course, these are things you can do manually in just a few minutes, but Alexa+ gives you the ability to do it in seconds via voice prompts.
Just, you know, don’t rely on that too much. Your friends want to text you, not a robot.
Receive and analyze documents
One feature that really makes Alexa+ stand out is its ability to work with documents. For instance, you can upload a PDF of your kid’s soccer schedule to Alexa+, and the voice assistant can retain information from it, as well as reference that information in voice prompts later. “Alexa, when and where is my daughter’s soccer game this weekend, again?” should give you a usable answer if you’ve uploaded the schedule.
In a live stage demo, a presenter uploaded a long, arcane list of rules from her homeowner’s association. She asked Alexa+ if she could legally install solar panels on her home, and instead of having to search through pages of legalese, she was able to get that information in seconds. That seems really useful — until it gets something wrong. I didn’t see that happen in person, but it’s inevitable.
Find music and movies for you
Do you vaguely remember some details about a song you heard once or a movie you saw years ago but nothing else? Alexa+ can help out.
In one demo, a presenter was able to pull up “Shallow” from the most recent adaptation of A Star Is Born by simply asking for something like “that one duet song Bradley Cooper sings.” In another demo, a different presenter was able to get a list of artists and songs that sample Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” The A Star Is Born demo had an especially flashy moment where the presenter asked to be taken to the scene in the movie that the song is from, and it instantly loaded the movie in Prime Video, right at that scene.
Again, this is something you can do relatively quickly if you’re good at using Google, but it’s nice to have options.
Raise your kids?
It’s easy to see the utility in all of the above features, even if some of them arguably encourage laziness and remove the fun of finding things on your own. This one, if I may be frank, is a little bit troubling.
Put simply, Alexa+ can do some of the things that parents traditionally do with their kids. Specifically, it can automatically generate bedtime stories based on voice prompts, complete with AI-generated art that looks really ugly in the way all AI-generated art usually looks. There was also a sizzle reel of kids asking Alexa+ the kinds of random, curious questions they usually ask their parents out of nowhere, like, “Do fish get lonely?”
I don’t know about all of that. One could argue that there are real benefits to raising your children yourself instead of asking a chatbot to do it. But if that’s how you want to live, Alexa+ can handle it.
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Amazon’s new AI-enhanced version of Alexa can do a whole lot, but here are some of the biggest new features.
