Alexa+ brings Claude into your home

Amazon has launched Alexa+, its biggest assistant upgrade in several years and much needed given how limited the platform has felt with the advent of ChatGPT. The new Claude-powered system works with most existing Echo devices and offers several advanced capabilities that bring it in line with current AI trends. Alexa+ combines multimodal understanding with agentic capabilities – it can autonomously browse the web to complete tasks without supervision. The system offers more natural conversations, remembers personal preferences, generates creative content, and even handles document and email ingestion via its app. Users can ask it to book restaurants, skip to specific movie scenes, or even have it proactively suggest earlier commutes based on traffic patterns. While Google Assistant offers similar features, Amazon’s integration across its existing hardware ecosystem gives it a potential edge. The commercial strategy is classic Amazon: Alexa+ comes free with Prime membership. While the service debuts in the US next month, British users face an unspecified wait, with Amazon only confirming a UK release “sometime in 2025.” The hardware compatibility is positive. Unlike many tech upgrades that require new devices, Alexa+ will eventually work with nearly all existing Echo products except the oldest first-generation models. Takeaways: Amazon is using its hardware advantage and Prime ecosystem to drive AI adoption in homes. The company is betting that everyday usefulness is possible from the combination of its own models and its Claude investment. For UK consumers, the wait might be frustrating but offers time to evaluate US experiences before investing. This approach to AI in the home shows how the technology is becoming a feature rather than a product, embedded in services we already use rather than sold as something new.