Amazon is betting that an AI assistant best known for turning on lights and answering trivia questions can become a sought-after benefit of its Prime membership, in the same league as free shipping and streaming video.
The company is making Alexa+, the generative AI-powered upgrade to its voice assistant, available free starting today to all U.S. Prime members, nearly a year after it was unveiled.
Tens of millions of customers used Alexa+ through an early access program, the company says. Today’s rollout opens it up to Amazon’s full U.S. Prime membership base, which is estimated at more than 200 million individual members by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.
Alexa+ offers more natural, free-flowing conversations than its predecessor, along with agentic capabilities such as ordering takeout, and booking dinner reservations and rides, in addition to core features such as coordinating across family calendars and checking smart-home cameras.
But the broad rollout comes more than three years into the generative AI era, with AI habits already ingrained for many users around ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others.
Given its late start, Amazon is hoping that unlimited access to Alexa+ via Prime (including a browser-based chat experience at Alexa.com) will help close the gap against those rivals.
In that way, the option to subscribe to Alexa+ for $19.99/month outside of Prime feels less like a play for standalone subscribers and more like a way to reinforce the market value of what Prime members will be getting for free.
Amazon is also offering a free but limited version of the Alexa+ chat experience at Alexa.com and in the Alexa app for non-Prime users.
ChatGPT’s free tier limits users to a handful of messages before downgrading to a less-capable model. Google plans to replace its Google Assistant with the AI-powered Gemini across Android devices, making Amazon’s timing all the more urgent.
Daniel Rausch, Amazon’s vice president of Alexa and Echo, said in an interview that the Prime benefit is aimed at customers who use AI tools but can’t or don’t want to pay for a standalone subscription.
Rausch cited the example of students and others who “bounce around between different chat assistants” when they hit usage limits on free tiers. He said offering unlimited access to what amounts to a paid AI service, without those usage caps, is “a really big deal for Prime customers.”
Whether consumers see it as a true replacement for other AI chatbots remains to be seen. Working on this story, for example, I tried uploading the interview transcript, past coverage, and Amazon’s blog post to Alexa.com for reference and analysis. The site was only able to accept one document at a time, unlike other chatbots that can handle multiple uploads simultaneously.
It’s a small but telling limitation for anyone accustomed to the competition.
But that’s a business use case that may not represent consumer patterns. Amazon’s larger pitch isn’t that Alexa+ is a better ChatGPT, it’s that it can do things other AI assistants can’t.
For example, having uploaded those materials individually, I can now ask Alexa+ on my Echo devices to reference them in its responses — something I’ve been doing already in the Alexa+ early access program with emails from our kid’s school and other family documents.
Rausch said 76% of what customers do with Alexa+ is unavailable in any other AI, according to Amazon’s own internal data. He cited functionality such as smart home controls, family calendar management, music discovery, booking reservations, and the thousands of device and service integrations that Amazon has built up over a decade.
Based on the early access period, customers are conversing with Alexa+ two to three times more than they did with the original version, according to Amazon, and engagement continues to grow week over week rather than tapering off after an initial honeymoon period.
Read the full article here
