This past week, Amazon introduced Alexa Plus, a new incarnation of its virtual assistant that’s all ready for 2025, equipped with exactly the sort of large language models (LLMs) and agentic capabilities that it needs to compete against the likes of Google Gemini. I got to check out all of Amazon’s Alexa Plus demos at its launch event, and while Alexa’s still capable of mishearing you and forcing you to repeat yourself or rephrase things, it’s honestly a pretty impressive upgrade, tying together a lot of smart home, entertainment, and assistant features in a way that I think is going to be extremely appealing to a lot of people.
And you absolutely should not subscribe to it.