Amazon’s Souped-Up Alexa+ Arrives Next Month

Amazon’s new and improved version of Alexa is here, and it’s called Alexa+. The next-gen upgrade is more conversational, can execute complex tasks, and is much more personalized. While the rollout starts next month on select Echo Show devices, Amazon claims it’ll eventually be available on every Alexa-powered device the company has shipped. It’ll cost $20 per month but will be free for Amazon Prime customers.

Here’s everything you need to know about Amazon’s new and improved virtual assistant.

Alexa’s Generative AI Era

Amazon says Alexa+ is “smarter than she’s ever been before,” capable of picking up on your tone and delivering answers in a more empathetic voice. It even has more powerful visual capabilities.

During a live demo, Panos Panay, who heads up Amazon’s Devices and Services department, used an Echo Show to snap a photo of the live audience and asked whether folks looked energetic. The crowd applauded at the start of the interaction, and Alexa+ analyzed the picture and said everyone looked “pretty fired up,” pointing out finer details like how people had laptops open, and that all eyes were on Panay.

The other big new feature is Alexa+’s ability to learn new information you provide. You can feed the assistant documents, emails, study guides, and recipes, and it will memorize it all, allowing you to ask for relevant information later. For example, if you upload a document of the rules from your homeowner’s association, you can ask Alexa+ a question like, “Can I add solar panels to my house?” It will reference the rules. You can refer to any recipes you’ve used before—or handwritten recipes you’ve fed to the assistant—and ask specific questions about ingredients or measurements.

The broad theme is that you can generally ask Alexa+ a question in a natural way and it should be able to help in some way. Where before you may have asked Alexa to “show me my doorbell feed,” now you can ask Alexa+, “When was the last time someone took the dog out for a walk?” You’ll need a Ring subscription, but Alexa+ can understand the context of what it sees through your security cameras. These features match many of the capabilities Google has been promising as it injects its Gemini large language models into Google Assistant.

Alexa+ is also supposed to be a lot easier to interact with daily. You can create routines using your voice rather than manually setting things up through the app. It’s easier to shift music throughout your house too. You can move it from speaker to speaker by simply saying, “Play the music downstairs,” or “Play the music everywhere, but don’t wake the baby,” and Alexa+ will know to play it in every room except the nursery.