The Newest Amazon Alexa+ Upgrade Comes With 5 New Features You Need To Try – BGR

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Amazon’s supercharged assistant, Alexa+, is finally available to American users after almost a year of tests. Powered by Amazon’s own Nova and Anthropic large language models, this new Alexa experience goes way beyond what customers were used to. Among the several new skills, Amazon says users have been using Alexa+ as their music buddy, to discuss the news, order takeout, schedule services or dinner reservations, and even use the assistant as a home guard, as it can connect to Amazon’s security gadgets.

The new experience is available for free as an added perk to the Amazon Prime membership, but you can also access it solely by paying $19.99/month. Amazon says that customers without a Prime subscription can try a free chat on Alexa+ for the web or the Alexa app, but only paying subscribers can get support across all Alexa-enabled devices, website, app, and more with unlimited use.

To start using the new experience, you can ask Alexa to upgrade to Alexa+. Once you do that, you can try some of these new features that will make Alexa a lot more conversational and intelligent, as it can get a lot more done in a more natural way.

Playing music has always been an important part of Alexa. After all, the personal assistant can play your favorite songs, albums, help you discover new music through Amazon Music playlists and so much more.

However, with the new Alexa+, Amazon says you can power up this experience by not only asking the personal assistant to play your favorite tunes, but also talk about them with you. The company touts that people are having “deep conversations” with the personal assistant as it starts to get the songs you enjoy the most, and starts making more informed recommendations based on that.

There are times when you just want to talk about that very specific Beatles B-side song, or how you love the “Abbey Road” medley. Well, instead of bothering your friends for the 100th time, you can ask Alexa+ to bring important information about an album, details from online searches, and even inside knowledge from the Amazon Music service.

Alexa could already read you the news based on its skills and integration with third-party newspapers. The personal assistant could also play your favorite news podcasts at any time. Still, Amazon is touting Alexa’s new capabilities as it can now discuss the news of the day. Of course, while we still highly encourage you to check your sources independently, Alexa+ can summarize, contextualize, and discuss current events.

It gets content from licensed publishers and you can then ask follow-up questions after it gives a summary of what’s been going on, like understanding why a subject has been covered so much by the media, who’s benefiting from those changes, and even get better insight if you started getting interested in a topic you’re not that familiar with.

Besides that, Alexa+ can understand what your favorite outlets are, what you consider important, and ultimately compare perspectives, just like other chatbots could do. So, for a specific, controversial subject, you can ask the assistant to compare different views so you can understand what resonates with you.

Also improving on its previous skills, Alexa+ can order your takeout. By offering a partnership with Grubhub, Amazon Prime users already get Grubhub+, which removes delivery fees on eligible orders, and lowers service costs. That said, instead of going through the process of opening your favorite delivery service, scrolling through a ton of restaurants, selecting the meal, confirming your data, and then paying, you can ask Alexa+ to order that pizza from the place you usually do.

Since Amazon, obviously, has access to your saved addresses, payment methods, and Prime benefits, this is a straightforward experience. Besides that, the service has context memory, so it knows your preferred address and if you have any dietary restrictions. It can even make the experience more conversational than just following a prompt. 

Thanks to its conversational skills, Amazon says that Alexa+ can help you find restaurants, make reservations, book a ride, and even schedule services. By searching information online and through its partners, which include Angi, Thumbtack, Yelp, Square, and Expedia, the assistant might find your next favorite restaurant, book a table when you don’t have time to do that, or even get a home service, like calling an electrician, cleaning, or repairs.

All these little tasks are part of the agentic features of Alexa+, which is something most AI companies have been tackling over the past year through agentic AI browsers and more. The big change here is that you can have the personal assistant actually working like a personal assistant. This means it can call places, book a table online, and come back only with a follow-up like: “I found this and that, is that alright?”

It’s important to say that Alexa+ is limited to its partners, as it may only suggest businesses if it can’t reach out or doesn’t have the proper permissions to book/schedule something. Still, it’s already a lot more useful than the past iteration of the personal assistant.

Probably the most interesting feature of Alexa+ is how it can connect to Ring Cameras. With that, you have a personal home guard always analyzing images. This way, you can get a notification every time something unusual is happening at your front door, or even if you just got a delivery.

Through this integration, Alexa itself can ask the visitor why they’re there, give pre-set delivery instructions, dismiss solicitors, and even greet known visitors. More importantly, instead of just buzzing users with notifications, Alexa generates AI summaries of what happened. Customers can also ask questions like “Did any packages arrive,” or “What happened outside this morning” to get a response from the assistant.

Users can also combine their routines with the home automation system, and Alexa+ plays an important role in that, as it can access your calendar and other pieces of information you decide to share with Amazon. While the experience has only just begun to roll out broadly, users can expect a lot more in the future as Amazon and other AI companies continue to master natural voices, roll out more helpful tools, and also make these assistants more agentic.