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In the coming weeks and months, upgrades to Amazon’s Alexa will be in customers’ hands. Alexa+ is the next step for the smart home assistant and it’s exponentially improved – and it makes Apple’s Siri look humdrum in comparison.
In a recent live demo in New York of the AI-enhanced service coming to Echo speakers soon, Panos Panay, Head of Devices & Services at Amazon, revealed the improved assistant, showcasing neat features. Just days later, Apple announced that its Siri – souped up with Apple Intelligence – that aimed at greater personalisation and context awareness would be delayed from round about now to some time in the coming year.
In the Amazon demo, simple spoken instructions from Panay led Alexa to play a song from A Star is Born, without being told the song title, then transferred the audio from an Echo speaker to an Echo TV. Panay then decided he didn’t want to hear the soundtrack and asked Alexa to play the song from the movie onscreen. Instantly, it switched from audio to video, playing the exact scene.
Demos can go wrong easily, but Alexa+ performed perfectly. As a presenter, Panay is supremely relaxed – or gives the impression he is, anyway. “Believe me, there were no tricks today,” Panay confides to me afterwards. “I can't tell you how scared I was.” Technical issues, such as servers or connectivity playing up which could have derailed everything, were nowhere to be seen. Footage of Panay’s home, designed to show the Ring doorbell in action, was immaculate, despite a local storm that saw trees downed and power outages in the area. “That’s the thing about being live, there are no back-ups,” Panay says.
The capabilities Alexa+ showed were highly impressive. But it also felt like just the first steps. “This was an opportunity to reinvigorate Alexa, for those that love her and then those that maybe don't anymore. It's not a reset. It's just the beginning of the next generation.”
Alexa+ will roll out in the US first and expansion to additional countries will begin later this year, though the date for it to arrive in the UK is not yet known. I asked if it would be for every Echo in time? “Not every Echo but the majority. On everything we're shipping now, and all devices in the last five or six years it will work and will be awesome. Once you're part of Alexa+, it just lights up all your devices,” Panay claims.
The pricing is $19.99 a month, with UK pricing to follow in due course. This means that it makes more sense to sign up to Amazon Prime ($14.99 a month including Alexa+), which also includes free delivery and access to Amazon’s video streaming services. “I would love every customer that wants to be using Alexa to be a Prime member. If you have a Prime membership, you have a Photos membership with unlimited photos and your experience is so much better, so much more personal. you have the Prime Video benefits, you have the Prime Music benefits, you have the shopping benefits.
“Our thinking was: let's make sure Prime customers get the best value possible, no matter what. If you don't want to be a Prime member, that's all right, you can have the Alexa+ service for sure, but it won’t have all the integrated services, it costs a little bit more, and the device acts slightly different. It’ll still be a great experience.”
Even without Prime, Alexa+ will be a personalised experience. It can connect to your calendar and to Amazon’s partners if you need services from them. So, it can turn to Grubhub or Uber to make it simple to order food or a car, for instance.
I ask Panay about the A Star is Born moment and say that it wouldn’t have crossed my mind to ask Alexa+ to swap from the audio to the movie. How will customers discover how much Alexa+ can do?
“What Alexa+ does is it creates a level of a discovery that would shock you. You just test it. And then you find it, because it's so natural and conversational and then she'll surprise you,” he insists. “By the way, I'm still discovering features. When I create a random routine and Alexa says, ‘I’ll do that, don't worry about it,’ you're just like, oh my God, I didn't realize you could. It's very cool. I think that's where the inspiration comes from.”
Panay has a disarming modesty mixed in with a quiet confidence. He says, “So, are you going to find a feature? I don't know. We're going to work to help discovery, we're going to be proactive. I think customers will discover features that they wouldn't never thought they'd use, or we would have ever marketed. They'll just find them. And what's amazing about the product is when you get conversational, and she starts asking you questions. It just opens your mind on what's possible.”
This seems like a big change from personal assistants now, which repeatedly just say they don’t have the answer.
“One of the principles we have but we didn’t talk about today is that current Alexa can have a lot of dead ends. You know, she’ll say, ‘I don't understand that.’ Alexa+ is always going to keep trying to solve everything. She’ll just keep reasoning. ‘I'm not sure what you're asking. Let me ask you a question here.’ And then you just have the conversation as opposed to ‘I don't know’. That’s also a point of discovery.”
I ask if Alexa+ is different in terms of what she’s listening for – after all, one of the hesitations people have about smart speakers is whether they’re listening all the time. “She's sniping for the wake word and that's it. But when she is listening, what's going on at the other end, at the Alexa end, is so completely different from what we've seen before. She's learning and reasoning off of it as you're speaking.”
Okay, so she’s still only listening for Alexa (or one of the words you can substitute for that if, say, there’s an actual person called Alexa in your household). But she sounds different. Has her personality changed, I wonder?
“We did a lot of work on this,” Panay says. “We spent months. We trained her with specialists. We trained for empathy, we trained for humour. And so, if you attack, she'll try and calm you down. If you are nervous, she'll try and help you not be. If you're exuberant and excited, she translates a little bit of your mood. You can make her responses shorter, you can make her more verbose, the flexibility is in the system.”
The proof will be clear when Alexa+ arrives in homes in the coming weeks and months. If the first, trick-free demo is anything to go on, the results could be remarkable – at the very least, we won’t just be asking Alexa to tell us what the weather is, or to set a five-minute boiled-egg timer.
English (US) ·