Amazon.com Inc. today debuted Alexa+, a major upgrade of its voice assistant that uses artificial intelligence large language models to automate complex tasks.

Executives demonstrated the service’s capabilities at an event in New York. They showcased dozens of features that span tasks such as finding songs and ordering takeout from Uber Eats. According to Amazon, Alexa+ can automatically complete actions across tens of thousands of services.

The upgraded assistant is powered by LLMs hosted in Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Web Services Inc.’s managed AI service. Alexa+ uses the company’s internally developed Nova series of foundation models along with algorithms from Anthropic PBC. The latter startup, which develops an LLM family called Claude, has raised $8 billion in funding from Amazon over the past year.

The models that power Alexa+ draw on information from more than 200 media outlets. Amazon detailed that the Associated Press, Reuters, TIME and USA Today are among the news organizations which will make their content available to the assistant. Alexa+ also leverages data about user preferences to personalize its output.

Optionally, consumers can expand the assistant’s knowledge base by uploading their own data. Alexa+ is capable of ingesting product manuals, study guides and a range of other files. Amazon says that the assistant can use its knowledge base to answer both highly detailed queries and prompts containing a “half-formed question or idea.”

Alongside its information retrieval features, Alexa+ ships with agentic capabilities. In an artificial intelligence context, an agent is an LLM-powered program that can perform tasks with a high degree of autonomy.

“Alexa+ is designed to take action, and is able to orchestrate across tens of thousands of services and devices — which, to our knowledge, has never been done at this scale,” Panos Panay, Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services, wrote in a blog post today. “To achieve this, we created a concept called ‘experts’ — groups of systems, capabilities, APIs and instructions that accomplish specific types of tasks for customers.”

At the New York launch event for Alexa+, Amazon executives demonstrated how consumers can use the assistant to order groceries from Amazon Fresh. It’s also capable of performing actions in third-party services. Alexa+ can book Uber trips, find concert tickets using a Ticketmaster integration, make dinner reservations and automate other multistep workflows. 

Smart home management is another task that Alexa+ promises to ease. It enables users to configure home appliances using natural language prompts. The assistant can also be instructed to perform some tasks on its own, such as activating a coffee machine every morning at 7 a.m.

“Providing devices that consumers use in their personal and professional lives is key for ultimate stickiness and adoption,“ said Inna Tokarev Sela, founder and chief executive of AI startup Illumex. “Given that Amazon is already in people’s homes already, what will truly move the needle for the company is ultimately the distribution channel of the new agentic AI service.”

Amazon will initially roll out Alexa+ in the U.S. with plans to gradually expand the service’s availability over the coming months. The company will waive the $19.99 monthly subscription fee for Amazon Prime members. 

Image: Amazon