Amazon Alexa+ comes to the UK and I saw it in action

I caught a glimpse of Alexa in the UK before the public launch. While Alexa’s voice remains the same as it was before, the level of understanding has jumped hugely, with conversations that are more like Google’s Gemini or ChatGPT. You can now say what you want and have discussions, which previously would be greeted with “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that”.

But Alexa loves to waffle. In many of the demos I witnessed, it’s clear that Alexa is happy to keep supplying information beyond the original question. This sort of contextual gumpf is typical of AI systems, with Gemini and ChatGPT both doing the same.

During the demos, Trevor Wood, Amazon’s lead speech scientist, said that a lot of adaptation had been made to cater for the UK’s 40 regional dialects. I noticed that Alexa would occasionally say “mate”, while at one point, it said, “I’ll just have a gander at that”. Hopefully, Alexa won’t always talk like a London cabbie in conversation.

For smart home users, creating ‘routines’ should be much easier. Previously, if you wanted to control a number of devices and assign certain actions (dimming the lights, switching on the central heating and boiling the kettle at certain times, as an example), it took ages to fiddle about in the Alexa app. Now you can just tell Alexa+ what you want to happen, and it should take care of it.

My first impression is that Alexa+ removes a lot of the frustrations based on voice interaction that the old system presented.

I’m going to be fully testing Alexa+ in my own home over the coming weeks to see whether it really changes the game, or just gets more irritating.

When can I get Alexa+ and what devices does it work on?