Better Late Than Never, Amazon Unveils A Generative AI-Powered 'Alexa+'

In terms of tech, there is no such thing as "aging like fine wine."

Since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, pretty much all tech companies put interest in this emerging Large Language technology, and that they began an arms race towards creating better and more capable AI.

Google jumped into the bandwagon early, knowing that it has Assistant, it quickly debuted Gemini to make the AI better. Apple, despite its late entry, has improved Siri with Apple Intelligence.

At the time, Amazon was not in sight.

After speculations, rumors and delays, the time has finally come.

Amazon now introduces 'Alexa+,' "the next generation of Alexa," powered by LLM.

The next-generation upgrade makes the old, outdated Alexa a lot more conversational, and also capable of executing complex tasks.

For example, the can be helpful in booking concert tickets, coordinating calendars and suggesting food to be delivered.

And because its an LLM, Alexa+' can learn from new information users provide.

Feeding the assistant documents, emails, study guides, and recipes, will make it memorize them all, allowing users to ask for relevant information later. For example, if users upload a document of the rules from their homeowner's association, they can ask Alexa+ a question like, "Can I add solar panels to my house?"

Alexa+ will then reference the rules.

And because it memorize what it's told, users can refer to any recipes they've used before—or handwritten recipes they've fed to the assistant—and ask specific questions about ingredients or measurements.

In the announcement, Amazon said that:

And to make Alexa+ more useful, the assistant also has agentic capabilities, meaning that it can navigate the web "in a self-directed way to complete tasks on your behalf, behind the scenes."

Amazon gave an example, where users need to get their oven fixed.

Users can use Alexa+ to find and discover a relevant service provider, authenticate, arrange the repair, and come back to tell users that it’s done.

" [...] here’s no need to supervise or intervene," Amazon said.

Users can also asked Alexa+, like for example, when was the last time they walked the god over the past few days. Alexa+, when paired with Amazon Ring doorbell subscription, can understand the context and pull up recorded clips corresponding to the request.

The idea is to make Alexa a more integrated assistant to Amazon's existing products and services.

"Until right this moment, right this moment, we have been limited by the technology," said Panos Panay, the head of Amazon’s devices, at a media event.

"Alexa+ is that trusted assistant that can help you conduct your life and your home."

In fact, Alexa+ is also supposed to be a lot easier to interact with daily, and to live with. Users can create routines using their voice rather than manually setting things up through the app, for example.

In other words, Amazon makes Alexa+ unlike rivals, which focus on "generative" to provide information.

This, makes Alexa+ more like a butler, if not a housekeeper.

And to have this butler or housekeeper around, the price is $20 per month.

In order to not alienate Amazon Prime users, Amazon said that Alexa+ is free for them.

Amazon said the first devices to get Alexa+ include Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21. After that, the rollout will be in waves to nearly every Alexa-powered device Amazon has shipped.

It's worth noting that Amazon didn't enter the generative AI race because it wanted. The reason is because it was struggling to catch up when relying on its own AI team.

This is why the company made a "strategic collaboration" with AI startup Anthropic as its "primary training partner."

Alexa+ utilizes both Amazon's Nova models and LLM from Anthropic, "a model-agnostic system, allowing it to select the best model for any given task."