Amazon has announced the official rollout of its upgraded digital assistant experience known as Alexa+, which will be rolling out to certain Echo devices in the coming weeks for an early access period, and then to all supported devices within the “coming months”. The company has been teasing the push toward LLM (large language model) AI with Alexa for some time now and it has finally gotten that ball rolling.
The new upgraded Alexa will be available for free to anyone with an Amazon Prime subscription, making for the best way to try the new experience. For anyone else, Alexa+ will run $19.99 a month as a standalone subscription. The alternative option making for a more expensive route vs simply signing up with Amazon Prime, thus it does seem like this is an act to bait people over to it.
Alexa+ is completely optional, as users will still have access to the same Alexa digital assistant that has been available for several years now. At least, until Amazon attempts to end support for that when it eventually tries to force everyone into a subscription model someday (hopefully, they won’t actually do that).
Moving to the newly enhanced Alexa experience includes several improvements, such as a more fluid conversational experience that doesn’t feel so much like a limited list of commands. Talking to Alexa will be a little more like having your own Jarvis, allowing you to explain what you want in various ways. Greatly improving on how it can help manage your smart home, calendar, and more. It can even notify you when tickets are available for something, or even help you find and book services.
It will finally be the next generation of digital assistants for Echo devices and should pave the way toward actually owning a proper “AI” in the future (turning sci-fi into reality). The technology has come a long way, although it still has a long way to go. This is simply the stage where companies feel it is immersive enough to charge for it.
Only specific Echo devices will support Alexa+, mostly including the more modern models. So it will be important to read the description of the Echo products you plan to buy to make sure they support the new AI experience. Thankfully, the list of supported models is pretty acceptable, thus you likely already have one (or some). However, In the beginning, Amazon plans to limit the rollout to the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, or 21 models. Owning one of these will help spread access to other Echo devices, with the exception of some of the more older models. Non-screen-wielding models will (obviously) be limited to a voice-only experience.
