amazon alexa ai

Introducing Alexa+, the next generation of Alexa

Powered by generative AI, Alexa+ is your new personal AI assistant that gets things done—she’s smarter, more conversational, more capable, and free with Prime.

Written by Panos Panay, SVP of Devices & Services

February 26, 2025

5 min read

Inventing Alexa+ required a series of technical breakthroughs, from getting LLMs to orchestrate APIs reliably to creating all-new agentic capabilities.

Alexa+ is our next-generation AI assistant that gets things done—it solves daily problems, keeps you entertained, helps you stay connected, and can converse about virtually any topic.

Alexa+ is easy to talk to.

Alexa+ turns talk into action.

How Amazon rebuilt Alexa with generative AI

Alexa+ is personalized to you.

Alexa+ is there when you want it, and fades into the background when you don’t.

Alexa+ manages your home.

50 things to try with Alexa+

Alexa+ will be available everywhere you are.

Alexa+ has deep knowledge.

Alexa+ is built with privacy and security in mind.

Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but is free for all Prime members.

Availability

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Alexa gets smarter: Amazon turns command-taker into plan-maker with Alexa+ launch

With a fresh infusion of personality, smarts and expertise, a new Alexa — officially, Alexa+ — is about to transform Amazon’s smart home control center from simple command-taker to a perky and pleasant reservation-maker.

But after more than a decade relegated to a corner of the kitchen turning off lights and turning on cooking timers, is Alexa really ready to take a more active role in our lives, handling complex tasks like ordering event tickets, adding kids’ soccer games to the family calendar and finding a shop and scheduling repairs?

More to the point, are we ready to hand over our phones, calendars and get-things-done apps like Grub Hub, OpenTable and Uber to Alexa+? And are we willing to pay for the privilege of a smart assistant at the controls?

As for whether to pay, Amazon effectively kicked that can down the road at its reveal, at least for its 200 million Prime customers. That’s because the $19.99 Alexa+ service will be bundled for free in the $14.99-a-month Prime service.

Alexa+ will start rolling out next month. You can sign up for a heads up at the just-live alexa.com site.

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At the reveal event, Amazon made a compelling case for Alexa+’s conversational capabilities. You don’t have to worry about being precise. She — Amazon insists Alexa+’s pronouns are she/her — understands English. (More languages coming.) You can interrupt her. You can ask her follow-up questions. She will get you.

Alexa+ is at its core generative AI technology. So consumers’ tolerance may be tested by inevitable mistakes, misunderstandings and downright hallucinations. That said, the more Alexa+ learns about you and understands what you do and what you like, the better the service will get.

After watching you turn on the living room lights shortly before sunset each day, for example, Alexa+ will offer to automate that. And once the system understands your preferences, it will automatically add your brand of pasta to a grocery order.

And of course, the more apps Amazon signs on as partners, the more likely Alexa+ will be able take over and do what you ask.

More Amazon news:Amazon debuts new Alexa+ with voice assistant and AI overhaul

Amazon isn’t the only voice assistance platform that is getting an AI infusion. Google and Apple have each upgraded their platforms. And while Alexa may not be the go-to assistant on smartphones, it is far-and-away the in-home voice assist leader — and a leading smart home controller as well.

For Alexa, the upgrade in smart home control alone could be a huge benefit for millions. Because rather than opening the phone app and naming every smart light and every room in the house, you can just ask Alexa+ to set it all up.

Unlike Apple and Google, which brag about how much of their chatbot is handled on-device, Amazon really isn’t in a position to do that. Not yet. The reason: the existing Alexa devices you might have in your home aren’t built for it.

That likely will change with new Amazon Echo devices coming available later this year and beyond. For now, though, Alexa+ will reside in the cloud. While that should lead to better answers — there’s a lot more horsepower in the cloud than there could ever be in an Echo — it may also be challenging to respond quickly.

“Until right this moment, we have been limited by the technology,” Panos Panay, who heads the Devices & Services unit at Amazon, told the event crowd. “Every once in a while a technology comes around and it changes literally everything.”

The new Amazon Alexa+ certainly has the potential to be that technology. Based on the limited view we’ve had thus far, the platform seems to have the personality, the smarts, the contextual awareness and the framework for new capabilities to make itself really useful. Even vital.

Will we give it that chance? We’ll see. Consumers can be brutally impatient with new technology. Remember, it was our low tolerance that put Alexa in the corner at the outset. Is Alexa+ good enough to cut through our frustration-in-waiting? That will be the real test for the platform’s personality and contextual prowess. I look forward to finding out.

Mike Feibus is president and principal analyst of FeibusTech, a Scottsdale, Arizona, market research and consulting firm. Reach him at mikef@feibustech.com. Follow him on Twitter @MikeFeibus.

Compelling capabilities

Prospects for Alexa+

Bottom line

Amazon (AMZN) is breathing new life into its Alexa voice assistant, outfitting the 10-year old helper with generative AI capabilities to better compete with the likes of Google’s (GOOG, GOOGL) Gemini and Microsoft-backed (MSFT) ChatGPT.

During an event in New York City on Wednesday, Amazon’s head of devices and services Panos Panay unveiled the company’s Alexa+, a version of Alexa that runs on Amazon’s own large language models, as well as those from Anthropic, in which Amazon has invested billions.

Available for $19 per month, and free for Prime users, Alexa+ is the company’s attempt to reinvent the assistant with agentic AI capabilities that let perform different tasks across multiple apps.

During a stage demo, Panay showed off things like how the assistant is able to remember personal preferences about people in your household such as what they like to eat, and then put them to use when you’re ordering food.

Panay also demonstrated how you can control products across your home with quick, natural voice requests. In one example, Panay asked Alexa+ if anyone had walked his dog at his house over the past few days, and the AI pulled up clips of his children walking their dog taken via a Ring camera at the front door.

Other demos showed off how you can upload documents to Alexa+ and ask specific questions about them, ask in-depth questions about your favorite sports teams, and even request and book an Uber for a friend that needs a ride home from the airport. The idea was to demonstrate that Alexa+ isn’t just meant to set timers or play music.

Conversations with the assistant were largely natural sounding, and should allow users to ask questions without having to use the stilted, AI phrases you’d otherwise have to use in the past.

Amazon’s Alexa was originally designed to serve as a gateway for Amazon customers to sign up for Prime subscriptions and as a gateway to purchase goods through the e-commerce giant’s store in a snap. But was never able to quite pull it off.

“This strategy failed and the company invested $25 billion in its Alexa division without truly revolutionizing smart homes,” Forrester VP and principal analyst Thomas Husson said in a note ahead of Amazon’s event.

Amazon stock was up about 2% following the announcement.

Amazon is pouring billions of dollars into its generative AI effort as it seeks to ensure its place as a leader in the space. In 2025, the company expects to spend a little more than $100 billion on the technology, including via new data centers and apps.