Amazon's Alexa+ now has a home on the web

Amazon's AI-powered Alexa+ chatbot now has its very own home on the web at alexa.com. You just need to sign in with your Amazon account to use it, provided you are part of the Alexa+ Early Access.

Amazon says over 10 million people are already using Alexa+, the AI-infused evolution of the Alexa assistant. These people are apparently having three times more conversations with Alexa+ than they did with the original Alexa. 97% of Amazon's devices that support Alexa now have Alexa+.

On the web, you can use Alexa+ just as you use Gemini or ChatGPT, which of course leads to the obvious question of why you'd choose Alexa+ over its two biggest competitors. The Alexa mobile app is getting overhauled too, with a more "agent-forward" experience (agent/agentic is the buzzword of the last few months in the AI space so Amazon couldn't help itself).

All that means in practice is that you're met with a chatbot interface when you open the app, again just like ChatGPT and Gemini - and again we're wondering why you wouldn't just use ChatGPT or Gemini. You can also share documents, emails, and calendars with Alexa+, and it will reference those when you ask something about them.

Amazon says it's differentiating Alexa+ by focusing on families and their needs in the home, including controlling smart devices, updating family calendars or to-do lists, making dinner reservations, adding grocery items you need to your Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods cart, finding recipes and saving them to a library, or planning a family movie night with personalized recommendations.

So if you live and breathe Amazon all day long, you'll love Alexa+. In fact, Daniel Rausch, VP of Alexa and Echo at Amazon, says in an interview with TechCrunch that "76% of what customers are using Alexa+ for no other AI can do". This also basically means that people are turning to Alexa+ only for those things which ChatGPT and Gemini can't do. We're probably not wrong in assuming that for everything that those two can do, they get used instead.

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