What Is Alexa+? How Amazon Will Bring ChatGPT-Grade Conversational AI to Your Smart Home

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have brought incredibly human-like conversational AI to the world, and the current crop of smart home voice assistants are left looking positively prehistoric by comparison.

Alexa+ promises to change all that. 

Meet Alexa+

Alexa Plus is a generative AI large language model, which means it’s been trained on huge amounts of text, language, voice, and conversations. With Alexa Plus, you can interrupt its speech, change the topic entirely, and have natural, flowing conversations.

Won’t Someone Think of the Children!?

Don’t want the full Alexa Plus available to your children? Don’t worry, you’ll be able to give them access to a more moderated version called Alexa Plus Kids through Kids Edition Echo devices or when an enrolled child’s voice ID is recognized.

Access to Stories with Alexa or Explore with Alexa will only be available if you already have an Amazon Kids Plus subscription, too. 

Pricing and Availability

Alexa Plus will cost the same as a ChatGPT Plus subscription, at $20/month—or free for Amazon Prime users. Given that Prime costs $140 per year, this is almost certain to drive users back to Prime. It’s only available in the U.S. at launch and will be rolling out gradually over the next few weeks.

What Devices Will Alexa Plus Work On?

It’ll be available first to owners of the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 smart display devices, where you’ll be able to enjoy the full interactive audiovisual experience. You can also apply for early access, and if you purchase one of those displays now, you’ll get priority access.

It’s worth knowing that the Echo Show 21 is a Matter controller, Thread border router, and even a Zigbee bridge, capable of being your complete home hub.

For voice only, the following devices will be supported:

• Echo (2nd gen and later)
• Echo Dot and Echo Dot Kids (2nd Gen and later)
• Echo Pop
• Echo Spot (2nd Gen)
• Echo Show 5 and Echo Show 5 Kids
• Echo Hub
• Echo Studio
• Echo Auto
• Echo Buds

You’ll also be able to interact with Alexa Plus in your browser, Fire TV, or Fire tablet.

Unfortunately, not all the Amazon devices that currently feature Alexa voice integration will be getting Alexa Plus, leaving the following without support:

• Echo Dot (1st Gen)
• Echo (1st Gen)
• Echo Plus (1st Gen)
• Echo Tap
• Echo Show (1st and 2nd Gen)
• Echo Spot (1st Gen)

Alexa Plus also won’t be coming at launch to embedded Alexa devices such as the Sonos One series, though it may get the upgrade later.

The original Alexa will remain functional and completely free.

What’s The Technology Powering Alexa+?

At the heart of Alexa Plus is Amazon Bedrock, a cloud service where you can rent compute time on any number of advanced AI models. Alexa+ is built on this, with Amazon’s own Nova LLM, as well as Anthropic’s Claude. They’ve also created a series of “Experts” to handle different aspects of the user’s query, encompassing different interaction models, service APIs, and features. Alexa Plus also uses “agentic” AI, meaning it can oversee a number of these experts to accomplish a goal without requiring your intervention.

Let’s say you need to get your oven fixed—Alexa+ will be able to navigate the web, use Thumbtack to discover the relevant service provider, authenticate, arrange the repair, and come back to tell you it’s done—there’s no need to supervise or intervene.

Similar to ChatGPT Plus, Alexa Plus will also maintain a working memory of your preferences, facts about you, and your schedule, allowing it to personalize results.

If you are planning a dinner for the family, Alexa+ can remember that you love pizza, your daughter is vegetarian, and your partner is gluten-free, to suggest a recipe or restaurant.

The Tragic State of Home Voice Assistants

Siri has always been bottom of the class when it comes to smart voice assistants. Seemingly hobbled by Apple's insistence on user privacy, their most recent efforts with "Apple Intelligence" even included a partnership with ChatGPT for questions that Siri couldn't natively answer. But far from a seamlessly integrated voice experience, Siri asks the user to tap a dialog to confirm that it can send the request to ChatGPT (every time, not just a one-time share setting). And while Apple offers some stunning speaker hardware, it still doesn’t support playing from Spotify, forcing you to go through the Spotify app on your phone.

Until now, Alexa has been perhaps the best voice assistant for natural speech, but less so for smart home integration. Very few of my devices played nicely with the Alexa app, and it was just clunky to manage my home.

I opted for Google as our primary voice assistant because most of my smart devices were compatible, it integrates well with Spotify, and offers in-home announcements. That's 90% of what I do with voice control. But when I find myself venturing outside of those well-practiced commands—wanting to converse in a more natural way—it all falls flat.

Our current generation of smart home voice assistants are very capable natural language processors. In other words, they hear a keyword and have a pattern of responses ready (user said “game results” and “Manchester United”; I’m going to search for games played by that team in the past week and extract the score).

Matter Saves the Day

Until Matter came along, having a smart home often meant being locked to one system. Your Apple HomeKit devices didn’t work with Alexa, and unless it had HomeKit on the box, it would only work with Google Home and Alexa. Matter fixed all that, unifying a set of standards for every smart home system to follow.

Matter-compatible devices can work on pretty much any Matter-enabled smart home controller. You don't need to be loyal to one system either; multi-admin mode means you can just pair all your existing devices with another system effortlessly.

If you're disappointed by existing voice assistants and have a Matter smart home, worry not: you'll be able to easily switch to Alexa.

Will You Get Alexa+?

Alexa+ might just be enough to bring me back to the Amazon flock (assuming it does eventually come to the UK). Matter has eliminated any cross-system device woes, and the Echo Show hardware does look brilliant.

The question is: will Alexa Plus be genuinely smart, helpful, and enjoyable to talk to? Or will it just be trying to sell you more crap you don’t need?