Over a year after teasing a next-gen Alexa virtual assistant, Amazon is releasing an AI-powered version called Alexa+. The new personal assistant can do things like order groceries for the household, facilitate event planning, manage smart home utilities and security, and, of course, shop online. “She’s smarter, more conversational, more capable,” according to Amazon SVP of Devices & Services Panos Panay. Strategically priced to entice the AI-curious into Amazon membership, Alexa+ costs $20 per month as a standalone service or comes free with Amazon Prime ($15 per month or $139 per year).

The new system will also be free to “anyone in early access, which will start rolling out next month,” writes The Verge, citing “a new app to go with the new assistant.” If all goes well, The Verge adds, Alexa+ “will take away much of the friction that comes with talking to a speaker” to retrieve information or execute tasks.

In a blog post, Panay claims querying the new Alexa “feels less like interacting with technology, and more like engaging with an insightful friend.”

TechCrunch reports that Alexa+ “is powered by a ‘model agnostic’ system that always uses the ‘best’ AI model for a given task.” Drawing from Amazon’s cloud-based model catalog, Bedrock, Alexa+ can choose from models including the company’s own Nova, as well as Anthropic and others.

At a Wednesday press event in New York City, Amazon VP Daniel Rausch explained the approach, elaborated in a news post: “We built an all-new architecture to connect to tens of thousands of services and devices” by leveraging APIs.

The approach “enables what might be considered ‘agentic’ capabilities,” writes TechCrunch, noting “Alexa+ leverages a new system called ‘experts’ for particular tasks, [to] orchestrate and execute Amazon services as well as those from third parties, like AI startup Suno’s music-generating tools,” and mainstream apps, from Grubhub to Tripadvisor, similar to OpenAI’s Operator, which comes with a $200 per month ChatGPT Pro subscription.

Alexa+ also has vision capabilities. At the press event, “Panay asked Alexa if anyone had walked the dog recently, and it referenced smart home cameras to respond that, yes, someone had,” reports The Verge.

CNBC points out that “Alexa+ will work on ‘almost every’ Alexa device the company has shipped.” An Amazon live event wrap says the digial assistant works with mobile or home devices, explainig the rollout will start with “households with Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21.”