BMW finally gets its next-gen Alexa voice assistant, and it comes with a genetic AI upgrade.
Amazon announced Monday that the 2026 BMW iX3 will be equipped with Alexa+, the same genetic AI technology that rolled out to millions of the e-commerce giant’s smart devices last year. This will be the first vehicle to come with Amazon’s next-generation voice assistant, the companies announced during the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
The launch is part of Amazon’s effort to bring its LLM-powered voice and digital assistant to every device — whether handheld or in the driver’s seat — that consumers touch. Alexa+ is already on more than 600 million devices. And the automotive industry is next on the list.
Bringing a customized version of Alexa+ into the BMW iX3 will be an important test for Amazon. Automakers have struggled for years to bring a voice assistant into vehicles that can handle complex functions and requests that don’t end with the driver yelling in frustration. Efforts to develop natural language processing—a form of artificial intelligence that allows computers to understand and respond to human speech—have been underway for more than a decade. And while progress has been made, these systems can still be easily thwarted by humans.
BMW and Amazon’s collaboration on Alexa+ has completed three years.
BMW announced in 2022 that Amazon Alexa would be the foundation of its next-generation voice assistant. This meant that BMW would not just integrate Alexa into its vehicles, but also use Amazon’s technology platform known as Alexa Custom Assistant to create its own customized version. That timeline was extended as Amazon worked on an in-car version of Alexa+, a revamped voice assistant powered by large language models that promises to deliver seamless and natural conversations, just like talking to a human.
Alexa+ was built using Amazon Bedrock, a service that allows AWS customers to build applications using artificial intelligence models from Amazon and other third-party partners. Customers, such as BMW, can then customize the app with their proprietary data.
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The end result, according to Amazon, is a voice assistant that can analyze complex requests, reason through steps, and take action across services. For example, Amazon says users can start a conversation with their Alexa+-enabled Echo speaker at home and continue it in their BMW. Once inside the car, the user can make requests through the Alexa+ assistant that might normally require opening different apps, such as music, navigation and a home security system.
