For a while there, voice assistants felt like a promise that never quite delivered. They became glorified kitchen timers, weather reporters, and a way to shout into the void for a song you half-remember. The much-heralded voice AI evolution seemed to have stalled. But now, thanks to the explosion of generative AI, the game is afoot once more, and Amazon has just made its big, delayed, and rather expensive move.
Amazon’s Alexa+, the supposedly souped-up, smarter version of its ubiquitous assistant, has finally been rolled out to everyone in the US. The question on everyone’s lips isn’t just “Is it any good?” but rather, “Is it good enough to justify its existence in a world with ChatGPT?” and, more importantly, is it a cohesive part of a grander strategy?
The Reluctant Rise of a Smarter Assistant
For years, Amazon’s approach was simple: get an Echo device into every room of every house. The hardware was the gateway, the Trojan horse to lock us all into the Amazon ecosystem strategy. You bought stuff from Amazon, you watched Prime Video, you listened to Amazon Music, and Alexa was the ever-listening concierge tying it all together. The intelligence of the assistant was secondary to its presence.
That all changed when conversational AI became, well, conversational. Suddenly, Alexa felt a bit daft. Amazon, caught on the back foot, has spent the last year or so trying to bolt a bigger brain onto its creation. The result is Alexa+, which Amazon now claims has “tens of millions” of users and, according to a recent CNBC report, is seeing two to three times more conversations than its classic counterpart.
Can You Put a Price on Personality?
Here’s where it gets interesting. For those not already enmeshed in Jeff Bezos’s world, Alexa+ will set you back a cool $19.99 a month. This pricing immediately reframes the assistant from a background utility into a premium service. For that price, it had better be able to do more than just tell me a joke.
But here’s the rub, and it’s a masterclass in Amazon’s strategic thinking: if you’re a Prime member, it’s completely free. That $19.99 price tag isn’t really for you; it’s a giant, flashing neon sign designed to make your £139 annual Prime subscription feel like the bargain of the century.
Think of it like this: the standalone Alexa+ fee is the exorbitant price of a single-day ticket to a theme park. It exists almost entirely to make the annual pass—your Prime membership—look irresistibly cheap. Amazon isn’t selling a smarter AI for $20; it’s reinforcing the immense value of its core subscription, adding yet another “free” perk to keep you from ever considering leaving.
Judging the Digital Brain: Conversational AI Benchmarks
So, is the new brain any better? Evaluating this requires looking at modern conversational AI benchmarks. This isn’t just about getting facts right anymore. It’s about understanding context, remembering previous parts of a conversation, and handling complex, multi-part requests without having a digital meltdown.
This is where the virtual assistant wars are now being fought. Whilst Alexa was busy learning how to order more loo roll, Google was integrating its powerful Gemini model deep into the Android operating system, and a little company called OpenAI was teaching the world what a real conversation with a machine could feel like.
Amazon’s claim of a 2-3x increase in engagement is their primary evidence of success. But what does that statistic truly tell us? It could mean users are delighted, exploring new, complex tasks. Or, it could mean they’re having to rephrase and repeat themselves two to three times as often to get a coherent answer. Some of the user frustration reported by CNBC over being automatically upgraded suggests the transition hasn’t been entirely seamless.
Smart Homes or Just More Complicated Ones?
This is where Alexa still holds a trump card: smart home integration. No other assistant is as deeply embedded in as many third-party gadgets, from lightbulbs to thermostats to robot vacuum cleaners. A genuinely smarter Alexa could finally deliver the dream of an intuitive, automated home.
The potential is there. Imagine an assistant that doesn’t just respond to “turn on the living room lights” but can handle, “Alexa, make it feel cosy for a film night.” This would involve dimming specific lights, checking if the smart blinds are closed, and maybe even setting the thermostat. This contextual awareness is the next frontier for smart home integration.
The danger, of course, is that a more complex brain leads to more complex failures. If a “smarter” assistant misunderstands your nuanced request and instead starts flashing the lights and blasting the heat, it becomes more of a nuisance than a help. The execution has to be flawless.
An Echo in the Valley with a New Story
Ultimately, the launch of Alexa+ is a pivotal moment for Amazon. It’s a defensive move to protect its enormous lead in the smart home space and an offensive one to prove it can still compete on pure AI firepower. The integration with Prime is a brilliant strategic manoeuvre, effectively eliminating the cost barrier for millions of its most loyal customers and creating an unparalleled feedback loop to train its models further.
Amazon is betting that its home-field advantage and the sheer convenience of the Prime bundle will be enough to keep users from defecting to Google or building their own solutions with OpenAI’s technology. It’s a race to see if Alexa can get smart enough, fast enough, to make its decade-long head start count for something.
But what do you think? Is a chattier, more context-aware Alexa enough to maintain its crown, or is the underlying intelligence of its rivals simply too far ahead? Let me know your thoughts below.
