Amazon upgraded Alexa to Alexa+ on February 4, 2026, for all US users, and March 19, 2026, for UK users, transforming the voice assistant that launched in 2016 as a kitchen timer into a conversational AI capable of booking reservations, summarising documents, creating smart home automations by voice, and generating original songs in under 3 seconds.
After 8 months of real-world testing across 2 Echo Shows and 1 Echo Dot, the verdict is nuanced: Alexa+ delivers genuine improvements in 4 areas and meaningful frustrations in 4 others.
What Alexa+ Actually Costs
United States: Alexa+ is free for Amazon Prime members. Non-Prime users pay a separate subscription fee.
United Kingdom: Alexa+ costs £19.99 per month (£239.88 annually) for non-Prime users. Amazon Prime costs £95 per year and includes Alexa+ at no additional charge. For any UK user not already on Prime, subscribing to Prime costs 60% less than paying for Alexa+ standalone, while also including free delivery, Prime Video, and Prime Music. Subscribe to Prime if Alexa+ is the reason you are considering a paid plan.
4 Things Alexa+ Does Well
1. Natural Back-and-Forth Conversation
Alexa+ converses without requiring the wake word between follow-up questions. It is a fundamental change from the original Alexa, which treated every sentence as a separate command. Ask a follow-up, change direction, or dig deeper into a topic, and Alexa+ tracks the thread.
The conversational quality is the single biggest improvement over the original and places Alexa+ meaningfully ahead of Google Gemini for Home’s current smart speaker experience.
2. Agentic Task Execution
Alexa+ books restaurant reservations through OpenTable, purchases event tickets through Ticketmaster, arranges transportation through Uber, and handles local search through Yelp, all by voice, without opening a separate app. The OpenTable integration works reliably in extended testing. Always verify the booking details Alexa+ confirms, if accuracy on dates and times matters. The assistant has produced incorrect day-date combinations more than once during testing.
3. Document Management and Calendar Sync
Email documents directly to alexa@alexa.com. From an address linked to your Alexa account, Alexa+ reads, summarises, transcribes, and extracts dates automatically. Handwritten recipes, typed press releases, cursive letters, and event flyers all process correctly in most cases. Alexa+ syncs with Google, Microsoft, and Apple calendars, adding extracted event dates directly to the connected calendar and displaying them on Echo Show screens simultaneously.
4. Voice-Created Smart Home Routines
Alexa+ creates complex smart home automations (called Routines), using a single voice command. Specifying a motion trigger, a device response, and a time window in 1 sentence produces a working Routine instantly. This removes the app-based setup process that made smart home automation inaccessible to most Echo users for a decade.
4 Things Alexa+ Still Gets Wrong
1. Memory Does Not Work Reliably
Alexa+ does not consistently remember user preferences stated in previous sessions. Dietary restrictions, music preferences, and display content settings require repeated correction across multiple sessions. Telling Alexa+ to stop making jokes, stop suggesting a specific artist, or remember a food preference produces temporary compliance. Not permanent retention.
2. Glitches Affect Existing Setups
Multiple users report that upgrading to Alexa+ deleted their existing Routines. Others report Alexa+ adding and deleting daily alarms without instruction. Some users experienced persistent smart home control failures severe enough to revert to the original Alexa entirely. Check all existing Routines and alarms immediately after upgrading, if your household depends on them for daily functions.
3. The Default Personality Is Exhausting
Alexa+ responds to adding items to a shopping list with commentary like “It looks like you’re making a tasty lasagna!” 3 personality modes exist, including Brief, Chill, and Sweet. Brief is the only mode that reduces the unnecessary commentary to a tolerable level, though it removes the conversational warmth that makes Alexa+ genuinely enjoyable in other contexts. Switch to Brief mode in settings immediately after setup.
4. Audio Command Recognition Remains Inconsistent
Alexa+ fails to recognise voice commands for songs containing specific words, like “book” being a confirmed example, affecting tracks by The Kinks, Talking Heads, Sting, and Peter Gabriel, among others. Commands shouted from across the room still go unregistered regularly. Smarter conversation does not equal better hearing.
Alexa+ and Its 2 Main Competitors
Google and Siri are the 2 main competitors of Alexa+. Google Gemini for Home integrates Gemini’s AI into the Google Nest ecosystem but runs on smart screen hardware unchanged since 2021. Apple Siri awaits a significant upgrade with iOS 27 at WWDC on June 8, 2026. Alexa+ is the only smart speaker assistant with full agentic task execution and document management available today.
| Capability | Alexa+ | Google Gemini for Home | Apple Siri |
| AI Upgrade Status | Full generative AI (Feb 2026) | Gemini integration (ongoing) | Limited — major update expected for iOS 27 |
| Hardware Last Updated | Echo Show 2025 | Smart screen hardware since 2021 | HomePod 2023 |
| Agentic Task Execution | Yes (OpenTable, Uber, Ticketmaster) | Limited | Limited |
| Subscription Required | Yes (free with Prime) | No | No |
| Document Management | Yes | No | No |
| Voice Routine Creation | Yes | No | No |
Why Amazon Built Alexa+ Despite Years of Losses
The original Echo reportedly cost Amazon billions of dollars in losses since its 2016 launch. It never generated the retail purchasing behaviour Amazon originally anticipated.
Alexa+ changes the financial model in 2 ways, including the following:
- First, non-Prime users pay a direct subscription, creating a revenue stream the original Alexa never had.
- Second, longer and more detailed conversations with Alexa+ generate richer user data that improves Amazon’s ad targeting capability across its entire advertising platform.
The upgrade is not purely a product decision. It is a monetisation pivot.
4 Setup Steps to Do Immediately After Upgrading
Upgraded your old Alexa to the new Alexa+? Here are the 4 steps you need to complete:
- Switch to Brief mode in Personality Settings to eliminate unnecessary commentary.
- Connect your calendar (Google, Microsoft, or Apple) for automatic event extraction and sync.
- Email alexa@alexa.com from your linked address to activate document management
- Set measurement units to Imperial in the Alexa app under each device’s settings. The default metric behaviour is a known frustration that device-level configuration fixes.
Final Takeaway
Amazon spent a decade building a device that billions of people used mostly to set timers and play music. Alexa+ is the company’s clearest admission yet that that was never enough, and its most serious attempt to fix it.
Whether it succeeds depends less on the technology, which is genuinely impressive in places, and more on whether Amazon stays committed to ironing out the frustrations that currently sit alongside the good parts. The potential is real. The patience required to get there is also real. For now, Alexa+ is the most interesting she has ever been, which is both a compliment and, after 10 years, a fairly low bar to clear.
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