Amazon wants Alexa to be a bigger part of your routine.

The company unveiled a new version of its voice assistant, dubbed Alexa+, on Wednesday after months of delay. The revamped Alexa will be more conversational and personalized, and it will be able to process a lot more user data if owners want it to.

That will enable the voice assistant to answer more personal questions, expanding beyond its usual, “Alexa, what’s the weather like this morning?” But it also means the software knows a lot more about you.

As an example, Amazon said at a New York event on Wednesday, users could upload guidelines from their homeowners association and ask for a summary of the section on solar panels. Or, a user could upload some recipes and then ask how much oil is used in grandma’s zucchini bread.

They could also ask Alexa+ to read and summarize all emails from their child’s school.

Users can also connect the new Alexa to Amazon’s video security system, Ring, and ask for a summary of the day: Did someone take out the trash? When was the last time the dog went for a walk?

“Alexa+ is that trusted assistant that can help you conduct your life and your home,” Panos Panay, head of Amazon’s devices division, said Wednesday in a statement shared by Amazon. “I think you’re going to love it.”

The new Alexa will cost $19.99 per month but is free for those who already pay $14.99 each month for an Amazon Prime subscription, the company said. It will be available first to customers who already have some versions of Amazon’s Echo speaker.

Alexa+ is powered by generative artificial intelligence — the latest AI technology that OpenAI’s ChatGPT popularized. Amazon, like every Big Tech company, has been pouring resources into AI development.

Panay said that “while the vision of Alexa has been ambitious and incredibly compelling, right until this moment, we have been limited by technology.”

Amazon first introduced the idea of a new, generative AI-powered Alexa in September 2023, at what used to be an annual devices event where the company revealed new software and hardware projects.

At the time, Amazon said the new Alexa would be more expressive, personable and fast, with the ability to remember and execute multiple tasks at once and continue a conversation after the user walked away. It still needed its “wake word” (Alexa) to know when an individual was talking to the device, rather than someone else in the room.

Despite promises that the new Alexa capabilities would be available to customers soon after the 2023 event, Amazon delayed the rollout for more than a year as it struggled to refine the technology and avoid errors when a user asked the device a question.

Former devices chief Dave Limp left Amazon shortly after the event. He is now CEO of Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ rocket company. Panay took over as head of Amazon devices in October 2023.

On Wednesday, Amazon said Alexa+ will “start rolling out” in the U.S. in the next few weeks.

The new Alexa comes more than 10 years after the voice assistant’s launch in 2014. Inside consumers’ homes, the device could play music, share the weather or search for the answer to a user’s random questions.

But Amazon has recently struggled to make money from Alexa, and the devices division was hit hard by the company’s sweeping layoffs in 2022 and 2023. The devices umbrella includes the company’s other gadgets, like the Echo speaker, Fire TV and security systems.

Now Amazon has poured resources into developing and harnessing the latest AI technology. At Amazon, that’s housed mostly under its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services.

Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky told investors at the most recent quarterly earnings call that Amazon expects to spend $100 billion in 2025 to support demand for AI services and tech infrastructure.

Amazon also unveiled Wednesday a new “web browser experience,” through Alexa+ and said the voice assistant will now be able to remember the context of previous conversations. It introduced a new display on its Echo devices when integrated with Alexa+ that switches from photos to a customized home screen as users approach.

Daniel Rausch, vice president for Alexa and Echo, said Alexa+ will have more capabilities in the future, particularly the ability to work with other apps to complete a series of tasks for users. As an example, Rausch said Alexa+ could help a user find recommendations for a maintenance provider and contact them to book an appointment.

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