Amazon Prime comes with an Alexa upgrade you should know about - Engadget

Why it matters

Amazon has rolled out Alexa+, a generative AI upgrade of its long-running voice assistant, making it free for Prime subscribers while offering a standalone paid subscription for others. The system is built on large language models from Anthropic and Amazon Nova, and Amazon positions it as a major step beyond the original assistant, with agentic capabilities that can carry out tasks in the background and integrations with outside services such as Ticketmaster, Uber, Grubhub and OpenTable. Access is available through Alexa-enabled devices, the Alexa app, the website, and select Fire TV hardware, though full access is currently limited to the United States and Canada, with early access programs in several other countries. The article stresses that real-world reception has been mixed: early adopters report consistency problems, memory failures, lag, and overly chatty behavior, and reviewers describe the product as useful but uneven. The piece frames Alexa+ as experiencing the same growing pains common to current AI products rather than the transformative assistant Amazon advertises.