Amazon's new Alexa+ announced: costs $19.99, free for Amazon Prime members

Amazon has announced Alexa+, its new generative AI-powered Alexa voice assistant that has beaten Apple to the punch.

Amazon's new Alexa+ is conversational, proactive, capable of reason and inference, and can learn from context and your life. It is a big leap into the true AI assistant world, where Alexa+ can plan a date, book a restaurant, text your loved ones, create a travel itinerary and add it to everyone's calendar, read your study guide, and give you a test on the answers, remember your favorite foods and movies, as well as finding your smart devices and take action. Phew.

It's not just boasting a host of new AI abilities, but Alexa+ will now be better than everything it used to do, no longer having to use precise phrasing or constantly having to say "Alexa". In the place of Skills, Amazon now has Experts, which is Alexa's various large language models (LLMs) that smartly tap into deliver on your requests however you phrase them -- this includes ordering food, turning on lights, through to things like who has been at your door, and what to cook for dinner.

Amazon says that it has tens of thousands of integrations through APIs as well as new "agentic experiences" that let Alexa+ navigate and fill out annoying web forms, and do things like book a cleaner for your house, or a repairman. The company is also revamping its Alexa app which will house Alexa+ on your smartphone, and a new alexa.com website that you can use with the new AI assistant from your keyboard.

Amazon's new Alexa+ service costs $19.99 a month and is included with Prime memberships. It's not available to everyone just yet, with an early access program launching in late-March in the US only, to customers with an Echo Show 8, 10, 15, or 21. Amazon says that Alexa+ will be coming to other Echo devices like the Echo Buds and Echo Frames, and be compatible with Fire TVs and Fire tablets.