- Alexa+ is now available on the web
- Users can manage tasks, plan meals, and organize life without relying on voice commands
- The Alexa+ rollout sets up a rivalry with ChatGPT
Amazon’s AI-enhanced Alexa+ assistant is stepping out of the speaker and into browsers. The tech giant has introduced a full-fledged web version of Alexa+ for everyone. The rollout creates a possible rival to ChatGPT, Gemini, and other fast-evolving AI chatbots.
Alexa+ provides more than a new coat of paint for the voice assistant. Amazon is keen to encourage people to think of Alexa+ as a kind of life manager across their devices and locations.
Offering Alexa+ to Alexa.com means you can have nuanced and more complex interactions with Alexa than the standard voice commands. Amazon wants to meet people wherever they are, regardless of their access to an Echo smart speaker.
To get in, most users will need to join the Alexa+ Early Access program. If you’ve got an Echo device already, saying “Notify me when Alexa+ is available” should put you on the list. Some newcomers with newer Fire or Echo products may also receive invites, but the program is geared to long-term Alexa users. Once you’re on the list, you can just log into Alexa.com and see the dashboard for Alexa+.
Nine months after its quiet debut, Alexa+ has started to show its hand. Amazon says it’s seeing twice as many conversations per user, three times the purchases, and five times the recipe requests compared to legacy Alexa interactions. And with the arrival of a browser-based interface, Alexa has a home among the more hotly discussed AI assistants like ChatGPT.
Celestial AI
Where Alexa+ starts to differ from ChatGPT or Gemini is in how it blends personal context with action. Amazon suggests asking for things like a week of low-sugar, high-protein meals to see how Alexa+ both puts together the menus and offers to fill your Amazon Fresh cart with the ingredients, cross-referencing your family calendar to avoid overlap with busy nights.
The same goes for other household management. Alexa+ can organize calendars from disparate sources of information, like photos of records, uploaded PDFs, and emails. It can also handle smart home devices without bouncing between a dozen apps or screens. All of it lives alongside your conversation with Alexa on Alexa.com.
If anything, Alexa+ seems to be targeting the everyday user more directly than ChatGPT or Gemini ever have. While those tools are pushing toward multimodal reasoning and abstract creativity, Alexa+ is remembering to remind you of your dentist appointment and helping you finish dinner before bedtime.
That’s also where Alexa has a baked-in advantage. There are more than 600 million Alexa-enabled devices in homes around the world. But going online means Alexa is on all your screens, not just whispering ideas from a speaker on your counter.
No AI assistant will be perfect, but if Amazon can convince people that Alexa+ has enough of the conversational elements that people like in ChatGPT, combined with existing and improved practical functions familiar to Alexa users, it might well win over plenty of skeptical users.
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ESchwartzwrites@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
