Hey Alexa, tell me about your new makeover

Get ready to experience the digital equivalent of meeting a new roommate. At a live event yesterday, Amazon unveiled its revamped Alexa+ voice assistant featuring generative AI.

The new Alexa+ starts rolling out to eligible Echo Show devices in late March, with a wider release over the following months.

• It’ll eventually become available across most existing Echo and Fire TV devices, an “Alexa.com” website, and an updated phone app, per the company.
• The service will be included with a Prime membership, and cost $19.99/month for non-subscribers ($5/month more than Prime).

What can Alexa+ do?

The tech giant demonstrated a range of AI-enhanced features, including its ability to respond to multiple prompts in sequence and to act as an "agent" by taking actions without users’ direct involvement.

• Amazon also says Alexa+ is better at understanding context and more natural user language.
• The upgraded voice assistant can also choose the best AI model available for a given task with the help of Bedrock, Amazon's grab bag of AI services.

Integration is a key selling point. What makes Alexa+ stand out from other AI voice assistants is its ability to seamlessly connect with Amazon’s smart-home devices, according to execs. In yesterday’s event, Amazon demonstrated how Alexa+ can sift through Ring camera footage to answer questions like: “Can you see if anybody walked a dog in the last couple of days?”

📸 Big picture: Alexa+ represents an effort to recoup some of the enormous losses Amazon racked up trying to monetize its voice assistant, which first launched over a decade ago. As of 2021, Amazon had lost more than $25 billion on its devices business, which includes Alexa, Echo, Kindle, and FireTV hardware, the Wall Street Journal reports.