Amazon’s AI assistant comes online with Alexa.com

Amazon’s AI-powered redesign of its digital assistant, now known as Alexa +coming online. On Monday, at the start of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company announced the launch of a new website, Alexa.com, which is now available to all Alexa + Early Access customers. The site will allow customers to use Alexa+ online, as you can today with other AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.

Although devices controlled by Alexa, including smart speakers Amazon Echo and monitors, have a permanent place with more than 600 million devices sold worldwide, Amazon believes that for its AI assistant to be competitive, it needs to be everywhere – not only at home, but also on the phone and on the Internet.

In addition, this expansion can give everyone 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 mobile app Alexa, which will now offer the option of adding an “assistant”. Or, in other words, putting a chatbot feature on the app’s home page, making it look like a normal AI chat. (Even though you chat with Alexa earlier in the app, the focus is on the chat — while the rest takes a back seat.)

On the Alexa.com website, customers can use Alexa + for common tasks, such as researching complex topics, creating content, and creating travel plans. However, Amazon wants to differentiate its agent from others by focusing on families and their needs in the home. This includes controlling smart devices, as you used to do with the original Alexa, but also means doing things like updating the family calendar or to-do list, making dinner reservations, adding the grocery items you want to your Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods cart, finding recipes and saving them to the library, or planning a family movie night with your ideas.

Recently, Amazon has been there including many functions with Alexa +including the addition of Angi, Expedia, Square, and Yelp, which will integrate with existing apps such as Fodor’s, OpenTable, Suno, Ticketmaster, Thumbtack, and Uber.

The Alexa.com website has a sidebar for quick access to the Alexa features you use most, so you can pick up where you left off with tasks like setting the thermostat, checking your calendar for appointments, reviewing shopping lists, and more.

In addition, Amazon wants to convince customers to share their documents, e-mails, and access to the calendar with Alexa +, so that its AI can be the center of control of what is happening at home, from children’s school holidays and soccer schedules to appointments with doctors and other things that families need to remember – such as when the dog was shot by the last rabies, or the day that the neighbor’s house does.

This is an area where Amazon will need to expand, because it doesn’t have the productivity or wealth that competitors like Google already have for their customers. Instead, Amazon has been relying on tools to send and upload files to Alexa+ for its AI to save them. This, in turn, will be a feature available on Alexa.com, and the information you share will be displayed on the Echo Show screen, where it can be monitored.

The ability to manage family information could be Alexa’s biggest selling point, if it goes well.

“Seventy-six percent of customers are using Alexa + without other AI,” says Daniel Rausch, VP of Alexa and Echo at Amazon, in an interview with TechCrunch. “And I think that’s a very interesting statistic for Alexa+ for two reasons.

He continues, “One, because customers rely on Alexa to do special things. You know, you can send a picture of an old family recipe to Alexa and discuss the recipe while you’re cooking in your kitchen, instead of what you have at home, and finish the job.”

But he says, another 24% are using Alexa to do other things that AI can do – which may indicate that they are switching their use of AI to Alexa +.

Alexa.com will only be available to Early Access customers who sign in with their Amazon account. Amazon has been running a steady stream of Access ever since its debut of Alexa + early last year.

Rausch tells us that more than 10 million consumers now have access to Alexa+, and are having two or three more conversations with Alexa+ than they did with the original Alexa assistant. In particular, they are shopping three times more with Alexa+ and using recipes five times more than before, he says. Smart home customers also use Alexa + 50% more for smart home control, compared to the original Alexa.

However, on social media and on the Internet, there are complaints about Alexa + bugs and errors. But Rausch believes those complaints are overrepresented online. He says the number of people opting out of Alexa+ after testing is in low numbers, average, or “effectively… almost non-existent.”

Rausch adds: “Ninety-seven percent of Alexa-enabled devices support Alexa+, and now we see customers using Alexa for years and generations of devices,” adds Rausch. “We support all of Alexa’s original capabilities, and thousands of services and devices that Alexa is already integrated with are being upgraded to Alexa+.”