Alexa+ is the generative-AI version of Amazon's voice assistant — same "Alexa" wake word, rebuilt on large language models from Amazon's Nova family and Anthropic's Claude so it can hold a real back-and-forth, remember what you told it days ago, and carry out multi-step jobs like booking an Uber or building a smart home routine from a plain-English description. It runs on Echo speakers and displays, Fire TV, the Alexa phone app, and Alexa.com. After roughly a year locked behind an Early Access waitlist, it's now open to everyone in the US: free for Amazon Prime members, $19.99 a month for everyone else. It's aimed squarely at people who already own an Echo or a Fire TV and want the assistant to be less of a kitchen timer and more of an actual helper.
Key Features
- Conversation with a memory — ask a follow-up without repeating yourself, correct it mid-sentence, and pick a topic back up later without starting from scratch. It also tolerates filler words, stutters, and kids talking over each other.
- It does things, not just tells you things — through the Alexa+ Store you connect services like Uber, OpenTable, and Ticketmaster, then book a ride, reserve a table, or grab tickets by voice.
- Smart home routines in plain English — "turn on the backyard lights if the floodlight camera sees motion after midnight" becomes a working automation with no menu-diving, and you can fire off several device commands in one breath without saying "Alexa" each time.
- It reads your stuff — summarize a long email, pull a date out of a forwarded message, add recurring events to Google Calendar, or ask questions about a photo or document you upload.
- Free on Fire TV for everyone — no Prime, no subscription: conversational show search ("something scary but not gory, under 100 minutes"), smart home control, and Ring camera feeds on the TV.
Screenshots
Why You'll Love Alexa+
The conversation finally feels like a conversation
The old Alexa needed you to learn its phrasing. If your light was named "kitchen sink light," that's exactly what you had to say, and "Hmm, I'm not sure how to help with that" was the reward for getting it slightly wrong. Alexa+ works the other way around — say "turn on the light over the sink" and it figures out which device you mean. Follow-up questions land without the wake word, and it doesn't lose the thread when you change your mind halfway through a sentence. For a house with kids or anyone who doesn't want to memorize command syntax, this is the single biggest day-to-day improvement.
It can actually get things done
The point of the Alexa+ Store is to let the assistant reach into other services and act. Reserve an OpenTable slot, call an Uber, add a dentist appointment to your calendar, spin up a motion-triggered lighting routine — the kind of thing that normally means opening three apps. When the integrations behave, it genuinely saves steps. It also handles the boring reading work: skim a forwarded email, tell you what time the thing starts, remind you later.
Where it still stumbles
This is not a finished product. Reviewers have caught it stating the wrong day for a forecast snowstorm, feeding the wrong pickup and drop-off address into an Uber booking, and "forgetting" an uploaded recipe photo two weeks after recalling it fine. New smart devices sometimes take weeks to show up. And the Alexa app itself is still slow and clunky compared with rival smart home apps — a real problem when the app is how you manage everything. Treat confident answers with suspicion and double-check anything with a real-world consequence, like a reservation time or an address.
Category: AI Assistants
Platform: Echo devices, Fire TV, iOS, Android, Web (Alexa.com)
Price: Free for Amazon Prime members; $19.99/month without Prime; limited text-only chat free for anyone
Frequently Asked Questions
If you pay for Amazon Prime, yes — Alexa+ is included at no extra cost, unlimited, for your whole household across every compatible device, the app, and Alexa.com. Without Prime, the full version costs $19.99 a month. Anyone can use a limited, text-only version for free at Alexa.com or in the Alexa app, and Alexa+ is free on compatible Fire TV devices with no Prime or subscription needed.
No. It's entirely cloud-based — the language models run on Amazon's servers, so an Echo, Fire TV, or the phone app needs an active internet connection to do anything with Alexa+. Lose the connection and you get no answers, no smart home commands through Alexa, nothing. There's no local-only mode.
On a phone, the Alexa app asks for microphone access for voice, and optionally contacts (for calling and messaging), location (traffic, nearby places, location-based routines), Bluetooth (device setup), and notifications. Getting the most out of Alexa+ also means granting account-level connections — linking Google Calendar, email, or services in the Alexa+ Store like Uber and OpenTable — each approved one at a time and revocable in settings. On an Echo there's no app-permission model, but the microphone stays on listening for the wake word until you press mute.