Amazon unveiled the long-awaited upgrade to its Alexa digital assistant on Wednesday, touting a new artificial intelligence-driven platform that can do a lot more than play your favorite songs, share the latest weather report or set a timer.
But after offering Alexa’s assistance for free on enabled devices since it debuted over a decade ago, interacting with the new and improved Alexa+ will set you back $19.99 a month unless you are an Amazon Prime member, where it will be added as an additional perk at no additional charge. Amazon says Alexa+ will be rolled out in the coming weeks with earliest availability for those using the latest models of the company’s devices.
Amazon says Alexa+ is powered by a mix of generative AI engines that make the assistant “much more conversational, smarter, personalized, and capable of getting more things done for customers.” It’s capable of connecting outside the chat platform to perform tasks like ordering food from a restaurant or grocer, making dinner reservations, booking travel accommodations and interacting with smart home devices.
Alexa+ can also perform tasks that have become commonplace since the advent of chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google Gemini. Amazon says Alexa+ can review, evaluate and answer queries about text-based documents that have been uploaded to the platform from a desktop browser, the mobile app or via email.
In addition to chatting with Alexa+ on Amazon devices, customers will also be able to access the platform in a new mobile app, available for both Apple and Android operating systems, and a new browser-based experience at Alexa.com.
Amazon unveiled other features at the Wednesday event in New York, including Alexa+‘s ability to evaluate and report on images and videos.
In one exchange, Panos Panay, Amazon’s vice president of devices & services, showed Alexa a video of the crowd in the room to test a feature that apparently allows it to sense the surrounding mood, per a report from The Associated Press. Panay asked Alexa if the crowed “looked pumped” to which it responded the room full of journalists were “paying attention to you and excited.”
Amazon also performed a live demonstration of Alexa+ researching and scheduling an oven repair service visit.
The original Alexa launched in 2014, at the time chasing Apple’s Siri voice-command assistant which became available on Apple devices in 2011. It’s since sold some 600 million units, according to Amazon, but has failed to live up to expectations and the company has lost billions of dollars on its family of devices.
This time around, Alexa+ is aiming to catch up with powerful AI-driven platforms that can perform a wide array of digital tasks like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. The new AI tools, which first became available to the public in late 2022, have capabilities far exceeding those of the original Alexa.
“They recognize they need to get this right and if they do get it right, then maybe we’re talking less about OpenAI vs. Anthropic and more of Alexa vs. ChatGPT,” Tom Forte, senior consumer internet analyst at Maxim Group, told CNBC.