Amazon announced Alexa+, a major upgrade to its long-running voice assistant.
What’s new: Alexa+, which accepts spoken commands and responds conversationally, is designed to work with a variety of vendors as an autonomous agent to make purchases, book reservations, play media, and so on. It will roll out in the U.S. over coming weeks, initially on some Echo Show devices and eventually nearly every current Echo speaker.
How it works: Alexa+ updates the system to take advantage of generative AI including Anthropic Claude, Amazon Nova, and other large language models. Inputs are filtered through a routing system that determines the best model to respond to any given request. It’s trained to understand colloquial, conversational language. Its personality is designed to be “smart, considerate, empathetic, and inclusive” as well as humorous.
- Alexa+ interacts with online vendors to manage smart-home devices (Philips Hue, Ring, Roborock), reserve restaurant seats (OpenTable, Vagaro), play music (Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Music, iHeartRadio) and videos (Amazon Video, Hulu, Netflix, Disney+), book local service technicians (Thumbtack), and purchase items (Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods, Grubhub, Uber Eats, Ticketmaster). Amazon+ will cost $19.99 per month, free with an Amazon Prime membership ($139 per year). (Disclosure: Andrew Ng is a member of Amazon’s board of directors.)
- The system recognizes individual users and keeps track of personalized information such as dates; recipes, and preferences in sports, food, music, and movies. In addition, it can respond to queries based on purchase records, video and music playbacks, shipping addresses, documents, emails, photos, messages, and so on.
- It can behave proactively, for instance, advising users to start their commute early if traffic is heavy.
- The system calls what Amazon calls experts — groups of systems, APIs, and instructions — that orchestrate API calls to accomplish online tasks. For instance, it can navigate and use the web to perform tasks such as finding and booking, say, a local repair service to fix a broken household appliance.
- Alexa+ can deliver timely news and information based on partnerships with news sources including Associated Press, Business Insider, Politico, Reuters, USA Today, and The Washington Post.
Behind the news: Amazon launched Alexa in 2014, and the voice assistant now resides in over 600 million devices worldwide. However, users relied on it more to set timers, report sports scores, and play music than to purchase products, and Alexa revenue lagged. Following cutbacks in 2021, Amazon made multibillion-dollar investments in Anthropic and set about updating the technology for the generative AI era.
Why it matters: Alexa, along with Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant, pioneered the market for voice assistants. However, as large language models (LLMs) blossomed, all three systems fell behind the times. (Google allows Android users to substitute one of its Gemini LLMs for Google Assistant, but the system still calls Google Assistant for some tasks.) Alexa+ is the first major voice-assistant update that aims to take advantage of LLMs as well as emerging agentic technology and improved voice interactions, and the rollout is taking these capabilities to a large, existing user base.
We’re thinking: Rapid improvements in the voice stack are opening doors not only for voice assistants but for a galaxy of applications that rely on spoken input and output. Product designers will need to learn how to design smooth user voice experiences. Watching how Alexa+ manages them will provide useful guidelines.