Amazon’s review of its AI-powered digital assistant, now known as Alexa+is coming to the web. On Monday, at the start of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company announced the official launch of a new website, Alexa.com, which is now rolling out to all Alexa+ Early Access customers. The site will allow customers to use Alexa+ online, in the same way that can be done today with other AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.
While Alexa-powered devices, including Amazon’s Echo smart speakers and displays, have a well-established footprint with more than 600 million devices sold worldwide, Amazon believes that for its AI assistant to be competitive, it will have to be everywhere: not just in the home, but also on the phone and on the web.
Additionally, the expansion could give anyone a way to interact with Alexa+, even if they don’t have a device in their home.
Related to this expansion, Amazon is updating its Alexa mobile app, which will now offer a more agent-oriented experience. Or, in other words, you’re putting a chatbot-style interface on the app’s home page, making it look more like a typical AI chatbot. (While you could previously chat with Alexa in the app, the focus is now on chat, while other features take a backseat.)
On the Alexa.com website, customers can use Alexa+ for common tasks, such as exploring complex topics, creating content, and creating travel itineraries. However, Amazon aims to differentiate its assistant from others by focusing on families and their needs at home. That includes controlling smart devices, like you could already do with the original Alexa, but it also means doing things like updating the family calendar or to-do list, making dinner reservations, adding the grocery items you need to your Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods cart, searching for recipes and saving them to a library, or even planning family movie night with personalized recommendations.
More recently, Amazon has been integrating more services with Alexa+including the addition of Angi, Expedia, Square and Yelp, which will join existing apps such as Fodor’s, OpenTable, Suno, Ticketmaster, Thumbtack and Uber.
The Alexa.com website features a sidebar navigation for quicker access to your most-used Alexa features, so you can pick up where you left off on tasks like setting the thermostat, checking your calendar for appointments, reviewing shopping lists, and more.
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Additionally, Amazon aims to convince customers to share their personal documents, emails, and calendar access with Alexa+, so that its AI can become a kind of hub for managing events at home, from kids’ school holidays and soccer schedules to doctor’s appointments and other things families need to remember, like when the dog got its last rabies shot or what day the barbecue is taking place in the neighbor’s backyard.
This is an area where Amazon will have to work hard, as it doesn’t have its own productivity suite or the wealth of personal data that rivals like Google already have for their own customers. Instead, Amazon has been relying on tools to forward and upload files to Alexa+ so its AI can keep track. That will also now be a feature available on Alexa.com, and the information you share can be displayed on the Echo Show screen, where it can also be managed.
This ability to manage a family’s personal data could be Alexa’s biggest selling point, if it does it right.
“Seventy-six percent of what customers use Alexa+ cannot be done by another AI,” says Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Echo at Amazon, in an interview with TechCrunch. “And I think that’s a really interesting statistic about Alexa+ for two reasons.
He continues: “First, because customers count on Alexa to do unique things. You know, you can send a photo of an old family recipe to Alexa and then talk about the recipe while you cook it in your kitchen, substitute the ingredients with the ones you have at home, and get the job done right to the end.”
But it notes that another 24% are using Alexa to do things other AIs can do, which could indicate that they are shifting more of their AI usage to Alexa+.
Initially, Alexa.com will only be available to Early Access customers who sign in with their Amazon account. Amazon has been steadily rolling out early access since its Alexa+ debut early last year.
Rausch tells us that more than 10 million consumers now have access to Alexa+ and are having two to three times more conversations with Alexa+ than with the original Alexa assistant. Specifically, they shop three times more with Alexa+ and use recipes five times more than before, he says. Regular smart home customers also use Alexa+ 50% more for smart home control compared to the original Alexa.
However, on social media and online forums, there are complaints about Alexa+’s glitches and errors. But Rausch believes complaints are overrepresented on the Internet. It says the number of people opting out of the Alexa+ experience after trying it is in the single digits, on average, or “effectively… almost none.”
“Ninety-seven percent of Alexa devices are compatible with Alexa+, and we are now seeing adoption by customers who are using Alexa over all those years and many generations of devices,” adds Rausch. “We support all the original Alexa capabilities, the tens of thousands of services and devices that Alexa integrated with are already carried over to the Alexa+ experience.”
