Amazon Takes on Google Gemini AI With Alexa+

We’ve been waiting long to figure out what Amazon was doing with its digital assistant. Alexa+ got all the fanfare today at an Amazon event. SVP of devices and services Panos Panay, formerly of Microsoft, debuted the next-generation edition of the shopping giant’s AI bot. Amazon hopes you’ll prefer Alexa+ over the other digital assistants in your home.

Alexa+ promises all sorts of new interactions. After mentioning the wake word, you can carry on conversations like you would with a friend. Alexa+ also has vision capabilities; it can use its camera to snap photos and analyze images to tell you things. Amazon also showed off Alexa, helping you get to a concert and finding out the ratings of local businesses.

Alexa+ still functions like before. It can turn the lights on and off, create routines on your behalf, and offer to play music. You can even ask it to help you recollect a song based on bits and pieces of it. Then, when it’s working time, Amazon showed Alexa’s ability to scan and understand handwritten grocery lists and instruction manuals.

What Amazon did here is to steer you away from its competition, namely Google. We’ve been waiting for this major rebrand since late 2023 when Amazon teased us that something new was coming. But nothing came, and since then, Google has launched more iterations of its Gemini AI. Apple has gone full in on Apple Intelligence, helping supercharge Siri when it seemed relatively lackluster compared to Alexa and Google.

This is a developing story. We’ll update as we find out more details.