Amazon is bringing its new AI chat assistant, Alexa+, to the UK, the first country to get the AI assistant outside of North America.
The company is currently letting users in the UK try Alexa+ for free through an early access program. Users who buy the new Amazon Echo will receive an invitation to the early access program, and the company says it plans to enable Alexa+ for “hundreds of thousands” of customers in the coming weeks.
Once the early access program ends, Prime subscribers will be able to use Alexa+ for free, and non-Prime users will have to pay £19.99 per month. The company has not specified when the early access program ends.
Alexa+ works with Amazon’s new Echo devices, Fire TV and the Alexa app, and can transfer the conversation context from one device to another. The company plans to extend support for Alexa+ to browsers as well.
Amazon said it has customized Alexa+ for UK customers and the assistant can understand the local context as well as commonly used phrases.
“Local teams, including engineers, linguists and speech scientists at Amazon’s Tech Hub in Cambridge, UK, have used different techniques – such as reinforcement learning, accent-neutral speech representations and local integrations – to make sure Alexa+ really understands UK customers,” the company he said in a blog post.
Amazon noted that users can request recommendations from services such as OpenTable, JustEat and Treatwell. They can also get their news from sources such as The Independent, The Guardian, Press Association and Future Publishing.
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Amazon first introduced Alexa+ in February 2025, but its rollout has been slow. By June, the company had just given one million people access to the new assistant in the U.S. Last month, it finally made Alexa+ available to all U.S.-based users. The company had also launched early access programs in Canada and Mexico.
Last month, the company introduced new “personality” options for Alexa+ to let users customize the tone of responses. Earlier this month, Amazon rolled out an adults-only “Sassy” mode, but said the assistant won’t support NSFW content.
