The AI-powered overhaul of Amazon’s digital assistant, now known as Alexa+, is coming online. On Monday, during the launch of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company announced the official launch of a new website, Alexa.com, which is now available to all Alexa+ Early Access customers. The site will allow customers to use Alexa+ online, just as you can today with other AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.
While Alexa-powered devices, including Amazon’s Echo smart speakers and displays, have an established footprint with over 600 million devices sold worldwide, Amazon believes that for its AI assistant to be competitive, it will need to be everywhere — not just in the home, but also on the phone and on the web.
Additionally, the extension could later give anyone a way to interact with Alexa+, even if they don’t have a device in their home.
Related to this expansion, Amazon is updating the Alexa mobile app, which will now offer a more “agent push.” Or, in other words, it puts a chatbot-like interface on the home page of the app, which makes it look more like a typical AI chatbot. (While you could chat with Alexa before the app, the focus is now on the conversation — while other features take a back seat.)
On Alexa.com, customers can use Alexa+ for common tasks — for example, exploring complex topics, creating content, and making travel itineraries. However, Amazon aims to differentiate its assistant from others by focusing on families and their needs at home. This includes controlling smart devices like you already could with the original Alexa, as well as updating the family’s calendar or to-do list, making dinner reservations, adding groceries to your Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods cart, finding recipes and saving them to a library, or even planning family movie night with personalized recommendations.
More recently, Amazon has been integrating more services with Alexa+, including the addition of Angi, Expedia, Square, and Yelp, which will join existing apps like Fodor’s, OpenTable, Suno, Ticketmaster, Thumbtack, and Uber.
The Alexa.com website features a navigation sidebar for faster access to your most used Alexa features, so you can pick up where you left off on tasks like setting your thermostat, checking your calendar for meetings, reviewing shopping lists, and more.
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In addition, Amazon aims to get customers to share their personal documents, email and calendar access with Alexa+ so its AI can become a sort of hub for managing things at home, from kids’ school holidays and soccer schedules to doctor’s appointments and other things families need to remember — like when the dog had its last rabies attack is the BQ neighbor.
This is one area where Amazon will need to expand, as it doesn’t have its own productivity suite or the wealth of personal data that competitors like Google already have on their own customers. Instead, Amazon relies on tools to promote and upload files to Alexa+ to monitor its AI. And that, too, will now be a feature available on Alexa.com, and the information you share will be able to appear on the Echo Show screen, where it can also be managed.
This ability to manage a family’s personal data could be Alexa’s biggest selling point if it gets it right.
“Seventy-six percent of what customers use Alexa+ for no other AI can do,” Daniel Rausch, VP of Alexa and Echo at Amazon, told TechCrunch. “And I think that’s a really interesting statistic for Alexa+ for two reasons.
He continues, “First, because customers rely on Alexa to do unique things. You know, you can send a picture of an old family recipe to Alexa, and then talk about the recipe as you cook it in your kitchen, substitute ingredients for what you have at home, and see the job through to the end.”
However, he notes, another 24% use Alexa to do things that other AIs can do – this could indicate that they are shifting more AI use to Alexa+.
Alexa.com will initially be available only to Early Access customers who sign in with their Amazon account. Amazon has been steadily rolling out Early Access since Alexa+ debuted early last year.
Rausch tells us that tens of millions of consumers now have access to Alexa+ and are having two to three times more conversations with Alexa+ than with the original Alexa assistant. Specifically, they shop three times more with Alexa+ and use recipes five times more than before, he says. Heavy smart home users also use Alexa+ 50% more for smart home control, compared to the original Alexa.
However, all over social media and online forums, there are complaints about Alexa+ omissions and errors. But Rausch believes complaints are overrepresented online. He says the number of people opting out of the Alexa+ experience after trying it is in the low single digits, on average, or “virtually… almost none.”
“Ninety-seven percent of Alexa devices support Alexa+, and we’re now seeing with customer adoption that they’re using Alexa across these many years and multiple generations of devices,” Rausch adds. “We support all of Alexa’s original features, the tens of thousands of services and devices that Alexa is already integrated with are carried over to the Alexa+ experience.”
