After more than a year of waiting, Amazon finally unveiled on Wednesday in New York City its next-generation Alexa voice assistant.
It centers around large language models (LLMs) like the ones that power ChatGPT or Google's Gemini. With the power of an LLM — which can understand and parse natural language and multistep commands — Amazon's newly coined Alexa Plus seems to be able to do a lot more than its predecessor, which launched more than a decade ago.
With Alexa Plus (Amazon is branding it "Alexa+"), you can use the AI in all sorts of new ways with your voice — like change the music between rooms in your house, buy groceries, or even set your calendar.
It also means something less exciting...
More abilities, more money
It turns out all of that extra voice assistant goodness will come at a cost — a real, dollar one.
According to Amazon, Alexa Plus will cost $19.99 monthly if you aren't a Prime member. However, Prime members can use it for free — for now, anyway.
On the one hand, the move to paywall the new Alexa Plus features seems par for the course. Subscriptions for using more advanced features are already a known entity in the AI space, and there's no reason for Amazon to exempt itself from that. "Plus" or "+" is synonymous with "paid tier" when it comes to technology by this point.
On the other hand, a paid-for Alexa is also an escalation. Voice assistants have long been a built-in feature of products. If you buy an iPhone, you get Siri; if you buy an Echo speaker, you get Alexa; if you pick up a Pixel phone or Google Smart speaker, you've got Google Assistant.
Not once in that long line, however, has Apple, Amazon, or Google decided to turn their voice assistants into subscriptions. Even Apple, with its new Apple Intelligence-powered Siri on the horizon, hasn't signaled it will charge for those new AI features.
Will Amazon's move to paywall Alexa Plus for non-Prime members set a precedent for future paywalled voice assistants? It's hard to say, but subscriptions are hard to put back in the bottle once they emerge as a revenue stream.
According to Amazon, the good news is that, subscription or not, Alexa Plus isn't the voice assistant of yore.
The Alexa+ proposition
To justify its new paywall, Amazon offers a long list of uses that extend far beyond what was previously offered.
A lot of those new capabilities are centered around added complexity. That means using Alexa not just for launching music or asking about the weather, but for things like navigating your smart home.
With Alexa Plus, Amazon says you can move music to rooms in your house, ask what Alexa sees on your Ring camera, or use more conversational language like "I'm chilly" to adjust the thermostat.
It's not just complexity, though. It's also interoperability. Amazon is also positioning Alexa as an AI agent — a trendy capability in AI that Google and Apple have also touted in recent months for their own AI services.
So-called "agentic capabilities" can carry out tasks on your behalf. That could mean, for example, booking you an Uber, ordering you takeout, or even hiring a maid to come clean your house.
In that way, Alexa Plus of isn't just a next-gen product — it's not just a better way to get the weather — it's a whole new one.
And with that whole new list of capabilities comes a whole new can of worms.
Alexa everywhere all the time
It's not just the paywall that could make Alexa controversial. It's the widening of its executive function, which means you might pay for the new voice assistant with more than your money.
While giving Alexa access to your Ring camera could be helpful, applications like that — and deeper integrations — require a new level of trust.
Voice assistants, including Amazon's Alexa, have already had their fair share of scandals. In 2018, Amazon, Apple, and Google all copped to using third parties to transcribe inputs from their voice assistants, which, as it turns out, accidentally captured all sorts of unsolicited sound bytes from people's homes.
While each of those companies created some safeguards around this practice (making voice data collection opt-in, for example), the moment marked a significant shift in people's perceptions of voice assistants.
A lot has changed since 2018 regarding how much people care about digital privacy, but an all-knowing Alexa is still a liability.
Having voice inputs recorded and listened to without users' consent is bad enough, but imagine if that same scandal were to occur with the scope of Alexa Plus.
Leaked personal information — or even the appearance of having your information monitored by an entity you didn't reasonably expect — gains more consequence when an AI has wider control over aspects of your life.
Where you live, where you're going, what's on your calendar, or even visual information from your smart home are all on the table, if there aren't safeguards put in place.
While no one is saying Amazon will collect or share that data, it's easy to see how one could find it difficult to believe they won't.
What's next for Alexa?
Amazon will slowly roll out Alexa Plus starting next month, so we'll soon be able to test its next-generation capabilities for ourselves.
Despite some obvious pitfalls, I'm optimistic. Voice assistants have long needed a boost, and LLMs could be just what the doctor ordered.
That being said, I'd hate to see them get rolled into a subscription — like everything else we use nowadays or, worse yet, compromise our privacy even further.
And the good thing is, avoiding those two things does feel plausible. And if that means a more helpful voice assistant that can do more than just set timers or rattle off the weather, I'll be the first one in line to bark commands at the first Amazon speaker I can find.
Either way, we're finally ready to discover what Amazon's next-gen Alexa can bring — for better or worse.
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