Amazon's Alexa Plus debuts with limited AI capabilities, full features coming soon

Amazon has officially begun the rollout of its 'Alexa Plus' service, an advanced voice assistant enhanced with limited artificial intelligence, currently available to a select number of users.

The current version does not include all the features showcased by Amazon during its recent device event, such as gift suggestion ideas, grocery ordering via voice commands, and accessing Alexa Plus through a web browser.

Reports indicate that some other features have not yet met Amazon's standards for a public launch, including the ability to order food using conversational context and recognizing family members to provide reminders for household tasks.

Currently, Alexa Plus is available on Echo Show devices (8, 10, 15, and 21), where it can perform tasks such as ordering taxis, identifying objects, composing emails, and searching for products. It also supports document summarization, but Amazon has not yet introduced the option to delete these files directly, suggesting users can request this through customer service.

Amazon announced the service back in February, pricing it at $20 per month for most Echo devices, or offering it for free to Amazon Prime subscribers.

The company confirmed that 'Alexa Plus' operates on a flexible system that utilizes different AI models, allowing users to choose between the 'Amazon Nova' model or others from companies like Anthropic, depending on the task at hand.

Amazon stated that new features will be gradually rolled out in the coming weeks. Users can register on Amazon's website to receive notifications about when the service will be available to them.