Amazon has finally unveiled its upgraded virtual assistant at its Alexa event today and Alexa Plus is going to completely transform your smart home.
From remembering your favorite foods, movies and music to updating your calendar, planning dates, booking restaurant reservations, and even calling your babysitter, Alexa Plus is the massive upgrade we’ve been waiting for. And the best part, it will be included as part of your existing Amazon Prime membership.
If you don’t have a Prime though, Alexa Plus will cost $20 per month. Likewise, not all of the best Alexa-compatible devices will support Amazon’s upgraded virtual assistant when it starts rolling out in early access across the U.S. next month. Instead, Alexa+ will be available first on the Echo Show 8, Echo Show 10, Echo Show 15 and the Echo Show 21.
Here are some of the cool new ways that you can use Alexa Plus to control your smart home, get more done and harness the power of AI using just your voice right from your Echo devices.
Transforming your existing devices
After you get access to Alexa Plus, you’ll be able to try out a bunch of new things on any compatible Echo Show devices.
For starters, you'll be able to create new Alexa Routines for your smart home using just your voice. This was previously only possible from within the Alexa app but now, you can use your voice to set up complex Routines right from one of the best smart displays which should save you a lot of time.
Chatting with Alexa will be more natural too and with Alexa Plus, you can easily get new music and movie recommendations just by asking. The same goes for when you have music playing in one room and want to move the tunes to a different part of your home. If you have a favorite scene in a movie that’s on Prime Video, you will also be able to jump directly to a specific scene by asking Alexa Plus.
For those with one of the best video doorbells or best home security cameras from Ring, Alexa Plus will make it easier to know what’s going on in your smart home by providing you with a detailed summary of events detected by your cameras.
For instance, you can see that a package was delivered and that the dog walker took your pet outside right when you step into your home through the highlights from that day.
This feature will also integrate with Ring’s Smart Video Search functionality and you can ask specific questions about whether or not someone took out the trash or when was the last time the dog went out for a walk.
Taking control of your calendar
One of the best things about having a large smart display like the Echo Show 15 or Echo Show 21 in your kitchen like I do is that everyone can see important info at a glance while getting ready for the day.
Now though with Alexa Plus, you’ll be able to share documents like emails, recipes and more with Amazon’s virtual assistant, and it can extract and remember relevant information from them. This info is used to provide you with helpful summaries but it can also be used to add events to your calendar based on specific requests.
One of the coolest Alexa Plus features for busy families is that you can forward emails from your child’s school and then it will break down all of the essential information for you. For example, if there’s an upcoming school event, you’ll be able to ask if you need to bring anything beforehand.
Fun for the whole family
Alexa Plus isn’t just for adults and at its unveiling, Amazon showed off two new features for Amazon Kids+ subscribers that should make learning a bit more fun.
With Explore with Alexa, kids will be able to ask Alexa Plus all sorts of questions about geography, biology and more, and she’ll respond in a conversational tone. While this will be a great help with homework, it can also help satisfy your child’s curiosity so that you don’t have to field all of the questions they come up with.
If your kids are tired of the same old books, by using Stories with Alexa, they can have Amazon’s virtual assistant make up new ones for them. This starts with a prompt like “Alexa, create a story about a bearded dragon that plays the saxophone.” Then from there, Alexa will ask them additional questions to fill out their story further.
Like the rest of these new Alexa Plus features, these two will be available on Amazon’s larger smart displays. As of now, it doesn’t look like the Echo Show 5 Kids will work with the company’s improved virtual assistant but that could change in the future or we might potentially see a Kids edition of the more powerful Echo Show 8 in the future.
Experts and agents at the ready
Just like with the best Alexa skills, integrations can add even more functionality to Alexa Plus and Amazon plans to work with tens of thousands of partners and developers to make this happen.
By using Experts and deep knowledge integration, Alexa Plus will be able to work behind the scenes to seamlessly coordinate multiple services for you and these integrations are done directly through APIs. One example Amazon provided at its event was having Alexa Plus make a dinner reservation for two using OpenTable, texting these plans to a friend and then being able to book an Uber for them so that they can meet you for lunch.
That’s not all, though, as Alexa+ will be able to use its AI agent capabilities to do things on your behalf. For instance, if you need a recommendation for a repair person, Alexa Plus will be able to find one for you, send a request to them and then book a service appointment for them to come to your home to take a look at a broken appliance.
AI agents will also be able to help you create new things and Alexa Plus already has an integration with the AI music generator Suno. At its event, Amazon showed off a demo where Suno was used to turn a simple, creative request into a complete song complete with lyrics, vocals and instruments. Capabilities like this will continue to expand too, as Amazon showed off a preview of its new Alexa I Multi-Agent SDK that will allow brands to showcase their agents alongside Alexa.
Alexa Plus: Outlook
So far, everything Amazon showed off about Alexa Plus has us pretty excited. Not only are your existing smart displays getting a ton of new features and functionality, but you won’t have to add another monthly subscription to your budget since Alexa Plus is included with Prime.
Amazon Prime has seen several price hikes in the past, so we’re a bit worried that another one could be coming down the road. For now, though, you just need a compatible Echo Show smart display and a Prime membership to get started with Alexa Plus.
Amazon’s upgraded virtual assistant will roll out first in the U.S. but we haven’t heard anything about availability in other countries yet. However, we likely will once the rollout begins.
As someone with multiple Echo Show smart displays and an active Prime membership, I can’t wait to dive into all these new features and test them out for myself. Stay tuned to Tom’s Guide as we plan on putting Alexa+ through its paces as soon as we get access ourselves.
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