Alexa+ is basically Alexa after a sabbatical, a promotion, and a personality upgrade – still the voice in your living room, but now a generative‑AI assistant that can actually think through tasks, not just flip a smart bulb or tell you tomorrow’s weather.

What Amazon is trying to sell here is simple: stop poking at 15 different apps, and just talk to one assistant that can remember context, orchestrate services in the background, and live everywhere – your Echo speakers, Fire TV, browser, and phone. For Prime members in the U.S., that pitch got a lot more compelling this week because Alexa+ is now bundled into your subscription at no extra cost, with a $19.99 subscription if you’re not in the Prime club and a limited free chat tier via Alexa.com.

Once you get past the branding and the plus sign, a handful of Alexa+ features actually feel like everyday staples rather than futuristic party tricks. These are the ones that genuinely matter if you’re deciding whether to lean on this thing as your primary assistant.

The first big upgrade is how Alexa+ talks – and how long it’s willing to stay in the conversation. You can say “Alexa” once and then just…keep going, asking follow‑ups, changing topics, or clarifying what you meant without rigid command phrases. It’s closer to chatting with a well‑briefed friend than issuing bullet‑point orders to a smart speaker, and it’s flexible enough to riff on whatever you throw at it: trip ideas, science explainers for your kid, or “what was that movie where Bradley Cooper sings a duet?” which it can now use to jump straight to that exact scene on Fire TV.

Layered on top is a kind of long‑term memory that makes the assistant feel less disposable. You can tell Alexa+ that you’re vegetarian, your partner is gluten‑free, your kid hates spicy food, and it will remember those details when suggesting recipes, restaurants, or even takeout orders. The same goes for practical stuff: your frequent‑flyer number, the mechanic you liked last time, the new restaurant you wanted to try – all stored so you don’t go hunting through old emails.

That memory becomes more interesting when you start feeding it documents. You can forward school emails, HOA rules, study notes, PDFs, even a photo of a flyer, and later just ask, “Do I need to bring anything to the fundraiser?” or “What does my lease say about pets?” and get a distilled answer. For students or busy parents, this turns Alexa+ into a very forgiving, always‑available summarizer that doesn’t mind sorting through the fine print you meant to read weeks ago.

Where Alexa has always tried to be your kitchen chalkboard, Alexa+ pushes harder into genuine life admin. It can read your connected calendars, summarize your day, and respect rules like “always add a 30‑minute buffer before yoga class,” then present all of that on a much larger calendar widget on Echo Show displays. If your life runs via email – school blasts, birthday invites, event confirmations – you can have Alexa+ turn those into calendar entries with notes, or simply condense several long messages into a bullet‑style summary so you know what actually needs your attention.​

It’s also decent at writing on your behalf. You can dictate an email in rough terms, ask Alexa+ to adjust the tone (more formal for a landlord, lighter for a friend), and send it without opening a laptop. If you’ve been using chatbots in the browser to draft messages, this is the same idea but fused directly with your address book and your Echo or phone, which is where a lot of people actually triage their communications anyway.

Then there’s the “talk to it everywhere” angle. Alexa+ isn’t tied to a single cylinder on your kitchen counter anymore; you can keep the same conversational thread going on Echo speakers, your car, the new Alexa app, or in a browser at Alexa.com. It remembers context across devices, so asking for dinner ideas on the couch and then asking for a grocery list in the kitchen feels like one continuous interaction instead of five separate sessions.

On the entertainment side, Alexa+ quietly fixes one of streaming’s most annoying chores: hunting through content you can’t quite describe. You can ask it to jump straight to “the scene where Bradley Cooper sings on stage” or similar fuzzy cues and it’ll fast‑forward to that moment in a Prime Video movie on Fire TV. For music, it can help you dig up the song that played over the credits of last night’s show, track your favorite artists, and nudge you when there’s a new release, which turns your living‑room speakers into a kind of always‑on music scout.

Discovery is also getting smarter: if you ask for “action movies,” you don’t just get a generic list; you see themed, AI‑generated rows like “Explosive War Epics” or “High‑Octane Car Chases,” which feel more like a human curator hand‑picked them. For podcasts, Alexa+ finally lets you search by episode details, so you can catch “that reunion episode of the reality TV podcast” without remembering the exact title. And if you’re already living with multiple Echo speakers, you can throw music from room to room with a quick phrase – “everywhere except the kids’ rooms” – instead of diving into multiroom settings.​

Where Alexa+ arguably makes the biggest leap over the old Alexa is in the smart‑home department. You can now build fairly complex Routines entirely by voice – no app spelunking required. Saying something like “every weekday at 7 am, slowly turn the bedroom lights on, start the coffee machine, and play calm jazz” is enough for Alexa+ to wire that whole automation up for you. It can even suggest routines proactively if you say “I’m having trouble waking up when it’s dark,” offering sunrise‑style light routines or other tweaks without you needing to know what’s possible.​

Those automations can be time‑based (“first weekend of each month”), weather‑based (“close the garage if it’s likely to rain”), or personalized to specific voices – so when your partner says “good morning,” it can trigger their custom mix of lights, coffee, and favorite podcast. On Echo Show devices connected to Ring cameras, Alexa+ can give you a quick highlight reel of the day – deliveries, dog‑walker visits, people at the door – instead of forcing you to scrub through a timeline yourself. And in everyday conversation, you can say “I’m chilly” and Alexa+ infers you want the thermostat nudged up, leaning more on context than scripted commands.

It also gets a more serious smart‑home dashboard. On Echo Show 15 and 21, you can pin a larger, configurable widget that pulls together your lights, security system, and cameras, and lets you flip between Home, Away, and Night modes or scroll a timeline of camera events. It’s the kind of at‑a‑glance control panel that makes the rest of the system feel less like a box of independent gadgets and more like an actual cohesive home platform.

Then you hit the “do things in the real world” layer – the part Amazon is clearly hoping will become routine rather than novelty. Grocery shopping is an obvious one: you can build lists by voice and then send them straight to Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods, or other partner grocers, turning “we’re out of milk again” into an order rather than a note you’ll forget at the supermarket. For deal‑watchers, Alexa+ can keep an eye on specific products on Amazon, alert you when the price drops into your comfort zone, and even finalize the purchase and email you the receipt.

Booking things is where Alexa+ leans hardest into its new “agentic” identity. Through OpenTable, you can say “book a table for four at Corzetti on Saturday at 7 pm,” and Alexa+ will handle the reservation and share details with your family. Via Grubhub, you can talk through a takeout order in plain language, tweak toppings like you would with a human server, and watch those changes materialize live on the Echo Show screen before you confirm. Ride‑hailing is similar: instead of opening the Uber app while you’re scrambling to get ready, you can ask Alexa+ to book a ride, see wait times and fares on‑screen, and head for the door.

The assistant also taps into Ticketmaster to scout tickets for concerts or games, and can notify you when prices dip into a range you’re willing to pay. For home maintenance or self‑care, Alexa+ pulls in services like Thumbtack and Vagaro so you can say “find someone to fix my oven” or “book a haircut or massage this weekend,” and it will compare options, help schedule, and then remember who you liked for next time. Travel‑wise, it plugs into Fodor’s and Tripadvisor to suggest destinations, activities, and itineraries, which you can then cross‑check or refine in a more conversational way than you typically can inside a single booking app.

There’s also a cooking angle that’s more than just timers. Alexa+ can walk through recipes step by step, set intelligent timers for each part, and adapt on the fly when you decide you want your steak medium instead of medium‑rare. It’ll also generate meal ideas that respect your dietary preferences, then drop ingredients into your grocery list or cart automatically.

Visually, Alexa+ gets surprisingly capable too. Using the Echo Show camera, it can identify objects and help with daily tasks: reordering pantry staples you hold up, identifying a plant and scheduling watering reminders, or helping with basic décor and outfit suggestions. Amazon explicitly calls out how useful this can be for people who are blind or have low vision, because it gives them a quick way to ask “What is this?” or “Is this the right can?” using only voice and the camera.​

Inside the house, Alexa+ becomes a lightweight family intercom and noticeboard. You can set reminders for specific people that trigger when Alexa recognizes them via Visual ID – for example, “When you see Dan, remind him it’s his turn to walk the dog.” Announcements can be targeted to particular rooms (just the kids’ playroom, just the bedroom), and Alexa+ offers suggested quick replies so people can answer without shouting back.​

If your Amazon Photos library is a mess of years’ worth of shots, Alexa+ can search it by people, places, or events – “show me our vacation last year,” “show me the best photos of the dog from last week” – and then display them on any Echo Show. You can have it play those photos as a slideshow with music, effectively turning your smart display into a dynamic digital photo frame tuned to whatever memory lane you’re walking down that day.​

Because it’s built on generative AI, Alexa+ also dips into creative territory. With its integration with Suno, you can describe a song – “a funny birthday rap about my daughter who loves dinosaurs,” for example – and get a complete track with vocals, lyrics, and instrumentation. On the image side, you can ask for custom artwork like “a retro‑style poster for our game night” or “a graphic for the dog’s gotcha‑day party,” then send the result to friends or use it as a quick‑and‑dirty design asset. Amazon has also added new Alexa+ voice options with a more expressive, witty delivery, which makes these creative flourishes feel a little less robotic when they play out loud.

If you have kids, there’s a parallel Alexa+ experience designed specifically for them through Amazon Kids+. When Alexa+ recognizes a child’s voice, it switches to age‑appropriate explanations, trivia, and interactive learning conversations, so “why is the sky blue?” can turn into a mini‑lesson rather than a dry dictionary answer. Stories with Alexa lets kids co‑create tales with their own characters and settings, which Alexa+ then narrates with sound effects and illustrations – a kind of build‑your‑own bedtime story factory. Parents also get stricter guardrails by default: no voice purchasing, and explicit music is automatically filtered out for child profiles.​

All of this, of course, sits on top of a new business model. In the U.S., Prime members now get unlimited Alexa+ as part of their subscription across all Alexa‑enabled devices, the Alexa app, and Alexa.com. Non‑Prime users can test drive a free, usage‑limited chat tier in the app or browser, or pay $19.99 per month for the full experience everywhere. That pricing, combined with the scale of Amazon’s ecosystem – everything from Fire TV sticks to Ring cameras to grocery delivery – is what gives Alexa+ enough surface area to actually matter in your day.

In practice, the most useful Alexa+ features aren’t the flashy one‑liners you see in ads, but the boringly powerful ones: turning that endless stream of emails and PDFs into simple answers, quietly orchestrating bookings and orders, remembering how your household works, and letting you talk to all of it like you would to a human assistant. If Amazon can keep tightening those loops – and if you’re comfortable letting one assistant sit in the middle of so many daily workflows – Alexa+ starts to look less like a new gadget and more like infrastructural glue for a very Amazon‑shaped version of your life.