Amazon announces AI-powered Alexa Plus

Amazon is finally launching Alexa Plus, the long-awaited generative AI version of Alexa that, if all goes well, will take away much of the friction that comes with talking to a speaker to control your smart home or getting info on the fly.

Amazon first announced it was going to “supercharge” Alexa with AI in September 2023. Back then, the company made a lot of big claims, saying that Alexa would understand context or build automated routines for you — you needed only ask. But by the following June, around when Apple announced its own Siri AI upgrade, reports emerged that the company was struggling to realize its efforts and that some employees were leaving because they didn’t think this version of Alexa would ever work.

The devices team at Amazon also saw a major executive shakeup in the interim, with longtime leader Dave Limp being replaced by Panos Panay, who’d come over from running Microsoft’s Surface lineup.

Now that its AI Alexa is here, Amazon is entering a world very different from the one Alexa was born into back in 2014. It will compete with a crowded field of AI-powered digital assistants like the way-ahead Google Gemini, the category-defining ChatGPT, and Apple’s reportedly also-struggling upgraded Siri. But with some very limited exceptions, those chatbots aren’t on smart speakers yet, and that may be Amazon’s opportunity. Its speakers could bring an AI chatbot to a lot of people a lot faster than competitors. Amazon just needs to finish getting it out the door.

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