After more than a year of delays, Amazon has launched the generative AI version of its strongest assistant, Alexa+, with a monthly fee of $19.99

Amazon has launched the long-awaited generative artificial intelligence (AI) version of its voice assistant, Alexa.

On Wednesday, February 26, Eastern Time, Amazon announced the redesigned Alexa at the 2025 AI Alexa event held in New York. This assistant, equipped with generative AI capabilities, is named Alexa + (Alexa Plus) and will launch a beta version next month, initially available to U.S. users at a subscription fee of $19.99 per month, with Prime members able to use it for free. Panos Panay, Amazon's Senior Vice President of Devices and Services, stated that "almost all" Alexa devices shipped by Amazon can enable Alexa+.

Amazon claims that Alexa+ is the company's "smartest, most conversational, and most personalized AI assistant to date," designed to "connect large language models (LLM), agentic capabilities, third-party services, and more to users' devices using cutting-edge architecture."

Daniel Rausch, Amazon's Vice President of Alexa and Fire TV, stated that as part of the upgrade, Alexa underwent a "complete architectural overhaul," and it is not as simple as just incorporating LLM into Alexa. Alexa+ utilizes a "broad range of state-of-the-art" training models from multiple vendors, including Amazon's own Nova model and models created by third-party AI startups like Anthropic, which is supported by Amazon.

Can analyze images, plan travel itineraries, create smart home routines, and perform fuzzy song searches

Users still need to activate the conversation with Alexa + using the wake word Alexa. Alexa + can order daily groceries for users, send event invitations to friends, and remember personal information such as users' dietary and movie preferences. Alexa + has visual capabilities and can take photos and analyze images.

Amazon demonstrated that Alexa + can remind users when concert tickets are valid and recommend local restaurants like Yelp in the U.S., as well as make dinner reservations. Amazon stated that Alexa + can read study guides and quiz users on their answers, research and plan travel itineraries, and organize handwritten documents to retrieve information from them.

Like the old version of Alexa, Alexa+ can also control smart home devices such as cameras and lights, but it can also create device routines for users. Users can listen to music with Alexa+, which can find songs based on relatively vague descriptions. Users can also ask Alexa+ to jump to specific scenes in a movie.

Commentators believe that many of the features demonstrated by Amazon show that Alexa+ is indeed much more advanced than Alexa. For example, during the demonstration, Amazon's Senior Vice President Panay asked Alexa+ if anyone had walked the dog recently, and Alexa+ responded by citing records from the smart home camera, confirming that someone had walked the dog

Finally Catching Up to Google's Gemini, Amazon is Expected to Leverage Smart Speakers to Promote AI Chatbots

Commentary states that over a year ago, Amazon first announced plans to arm Alexa with AI, and now Alexa has finally caught up with Google's AI assistant Gemini.

In September 2023, Amazon previewed that the AI-enhanced Alexa would be able to understand context and automatically generate daily living activities upon user request. Amazon demonstrated at that time that Alexa could have "human-like interactions" with users, a feature referred to as "Let’s chat," and indicated that this feature would be offered to Echo users in an "early preview." However, ultimately, Amazon did not publicly launch Alexa with this chat feature.

In June of last year, when Apple showcased the new Siri supported by large models, reports emerged that Amazon was struggling to achieve the aforementioned AI capabilities for Alexa, with some employees leaving the company because they believed that the new version of Alexa that Amazon envisioned would never be realized.

Commentary suggests that now Alexa+ needs to compete with numerous AI-powered digital assistants like Gemini and ChatGPT, but in most cases, Alexa+'s competitors have not yet appeared in smart speakers, which could be an opportunity for Amazon to leverage speakers to more quickly promote AI chatbots to the public.

Charging for Alexa Could Help Offset AI Development Costs and Improve Digital Assistant Profitability

Jitesh Ubrani, IDC's research manager for wearable devices and other devices, believes that Amazon charging subscription fees for Alexa could help the company offset the high costs of AI development and make the digital assistant a more profitable business.

Ubrani stated that Amazon is cautious about paid Alexa services to avoid alienating Prime members who already pay $139 annually. They must also demonstrate to users what capabilities the new version of Alexa has that are worth charging for.

Ubrani mentioned that Alexa's audience is already very large, so even converting a small portion of users to subscriptions could bring significant revenue to Amazon.

Currently, the monthly fee for Alexa+ is comparable to ChatGPT Plus, which charges $20 per month for its paid subscription version. Anthropic also charges $20 per month for its Claude chatbot