Get ready for the future of virtual assistants with Amazon’s Alexa+ upgrade, packed with features that make it more conversational, capable of executing complex tasks, and highly personalized.
Alexa+ is here, and it’s packed with features that make it more conversational, capable of executing complex tasks, and highly personalized. This next-gen upgrade will start rolling out next month on select Echo Show devices, but Amazon promises it’ll eventually be available on every Alexa-powered device the company has shipped.
Alexa+ is an upgraded version of Amazon's popular voice assistant, 'Alexa.'
Launched in 2022, it offers advanced features such as improved speech recognition, enhanced multi-room audio control, and integration with smart home devices.
Alexa+ also provides personalized recommendations based on users' preferences and habits.
The service requires a subscription, which includes additional benefits like ad-free music streaming and early access to new features.
A New Era for Alexa
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, allowing it to analyze images and provide detailed information. In a live demo, Panos Panay used an Echo Show to snap a photo of the audience and asked whether folks looked energetic. 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 Panos Panay.
Learning and Memory
One of the biggest new features 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.
Conversational Capabilities
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.
Easier Interactions
Alexa+ is also designed to be 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.‘
The Road Ahead
_Alexa+ is a significant improvement over its predecessor and marks Amazon‘s efforts to catch up with competitors like Google‘s Gemini. The new assistant utilizes both Amazon‘s Nova models and large language models from Anthropic, allowing it to select the best model for any given task.
Availability and Pricing
Alexa+ will cost $20 per month but will be free for Amazon Prime members. Early access will begin rolling out next month in the US, starting with the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 devices. After that, the rollout will be in waves, but the new assistant should be accessible on nearly every Alexa-powered device Amazon has shipped.
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