Amazon unveils revamped Alexa with AI features for $19.99 per month, free for Prime members

Amazon on Wednesday announced a long-awaited overhaul of its Alexa digital assistant and will charge a monthly subscription fee to access it.

The revamped service, which Amazon is calling “Alexa+,” is powered by generative artificial intelligence, Panos Panay, the company’s senior vice president of devices and services, said on stage at an event in New York.

For the first time, Amazon will charge users to access the revamped Alexa+. The service will be $19.99 a month, or free for Amazon Prime members, and will roll out in early access next month.

“Every once in a while, a technology comes around and it changes everything,” Panay said. ”[Large language models] enter the stage and fundamentally change the way we think about AI ... It’s shaken up everything.”

Alexa+ can purchase concert tickets, order groceries, book dinner reservations and give recipe suggestions tailored to specific people in a user’s household, among other tasks. It can also read study guides, then quiz users on the answers, as well as organize handwritten documents and recall information from them.

“She’ll learn the rhythm of your life and proactively take action with you,” Panay said.

Alexa+ will work on “almost every” Alexa device the company has shipped, Panay said. Although every demonstration Amazon gave of Alexa+ was on an Echo Show, its voice-controlled display with a touchscreen.

Daniel Rausch, Amazon’s vice president of Alexa and Fire TV, said on stage that Alexa has undergone a “complete re-architecture” as part of the upgrade.

“It is not as easy as taking an LLM and jacking it into the original Alexa,” Rausch said.

Alexa+ uses a “broad range of state-of-the-art” training models from several providers, Rausch said. That includes Amazon’s own set of Nova models, as well as those created by third parties like Amazon-backed AI startup Anthropic.

With the announcement, Amazon tried to highlight how Alexa isn’t just a useful tool for questions and answers, but also taking actions on a user’s behalf as an “agent.” A growing number of companies are building AI agents as they look beyond text and image generators.