Tech

Amazon rolls out Alexa+ to all U.S. customers, making its AI assistant free for Prime members

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5 February 2026

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Amazon is betting that an AI assistant best known for turning on lights and answering trivia questions can become a sought-after benefit of its Prime membership, in the same league as free shipping and streaming video.

The company is making Alexa+, the generative AI-powered upgrade to its voice assistant, available free starting today to all U.S. Prime members, nearly a year after it was unveiled.

Tens of millions of customers used Alexa+ through an early access program, the company says. Today’s rollout opens it up to Amazon’s full U.S. Prime membership base, which is estimated at more than 200 million individual members by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

Alexa+ offers more natural, free-flowing conversations than its predecessor, along with agentic capabilities such as ordering takeout, and booking dinner reservations and rides, in addition to core features such as coordinating across family calendars and checking smart-home cameras.

But the broad rollout comes more than three years into the generative AI era, with AI habits already ingrained for many users around ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others.

Given its late start, Amazon is hoping that unlimited access to Alexa+ via Prime (including a browser-based chat experience at Alexa.com) will help close the gap against those rivals.

In that way, the option to subscribe to Alexa+ for $19.99/month outside of Prime feels less like a play for standalone subscribers and more like a way to reinforce the market value of what Prime members will be getting for free.

Amazon is also offering a free but limited version of the Alexa+ chat experience at Alexa.com and in the Alexa app for non-Prime users.

ChatGPT’s free tier limits users to a handful of messages before downgrading to a less-capable model. Google plans to replace its Google Assistant with the AI-powered Gemini across Android devices, making Amazon’s timing all the more urgent.

Daniel Rausch, Amazon’s vice president of Alexa and Echo, said in an interview that the Prime benefit is aimed at customers who use AI tools but can’t or don’t want to pay for a standalone subscription.

Rausch cited the example of students and others who “bounce around between different chat assistants” when they hit usage limits on free tiers. He said offering unlimited access to what amounts to a paid AI service, without those usage caps, is “a really big deal for Prime customers.”

Whether consumers see it as a true replacement for other AI chatbots remains to be seen. Working on this story, for example, I tried uploading the interview transcript, past coverage, and Amazon’s blog post to Alexa.com for reference and analysis. The site was only able to accept one document at a time, unlike other chatbots that can handle multiple uploads simultaneously.

It’s a small but telling limitation for anyone accustomed to the competition.

But that’s a business use case that may not represent consumer patterns. Amazon’s larger pitch isn’t that Alexa+ is a better ChatGPT, it’s that it can do things other AI assistants can’t.

For example, having uploaded those materials individually, I can now ask Alexa+ on my Echo devices to reference them in its responses — something I’ve been doing already in the Alexa+ early access program with emails from our kid’s school and other family documents.

Rausch said 76% of what customers do with Alexa+ is unavailable in any other AI, according to Amazon’s own internal data. He cited functionality such as smart home controls, family calendar management, music discovery, booking reservations, and the thousands of device and service integrations that Amazon has built up over a decade.

Based on the early access period, customers are conversing with Alexa+ two to three times more than they did with the original version, according to Amazon, and engagement continues to grow week over week rather than tapering off after an initial honeymoon period.

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ElevenLabs hits $11bn valuation with $500m series D funding round

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5 February 2026

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Once somewhat of an outcast in Hollywood, today ElevenLabs counts some big stars on its roster, and it has just raised a $500m series D round.

ElevenLabs has raised $500m in a Series D funding round led by Sequoia Capital with partner Andrew Reed joining the board. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Iconiq participated, with new investors coming on board including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Evantic Capital and Bond.

The new round gives ElevenLabs an $11bn valuation, more than tripling its valuation in the space of a year. ElevenLabs started out in 2022, developing a human-like AI text to speech model that got it into hot water in the early days with various Hollywood stars like Emma Watson. Voice actors took them to court at the time and ElevenLabs subsequently settled the lawsuit.

These days some of Hollywood’s elite are fully on board. In November 2025 it launched its Iconic Marketplace, adding actors Michael Caine and Matthew McConaughey to its roster. Having been burnt early on, the company today describes Iconic Marketplace as solving “a key ethical challenge in AI-driven media creation by enabling the ethical sourcing and licensing of some of the world’s most recognisable voices”.

“We started by building a voice that could sound human – and we did,” said said Piotr Dabkowski, co-founder of ElevenLabs. “Today we are building foundational models across the full audio stack – text to speech, transcription, music, dubbing and conversational models with a world-leading research team.”

“This funding helps us go beyond voice alone to transform how we interact with technology altogether. We plan to expand our Creative offering – helping creators combine our best-in-class audio with video and Agents.”

ElevenLabs says the funding will help it to continue its international expansion across London, New York, San Francisco, Warsaw, Dublin, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Bengaluru, Sydney, São Paulo, Berlin, Paris and Mexico City, where they plan to have “go-to-market teams” to support enterprise adoption.

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Interlune digs into the development of an excavator for helium-3 and construction projects on the moon

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5 February 2026

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Interlune and Vermeer worked together to test a full-scale prototype of an excavator with auxiliary components. (Interlune / Vermeer Photo)

Interlune is leveraging a $150,000 NASA contract to develop develop lunar trenching and excavation technology — and although the primary goal is to extract valuable helium-3 from moon dirt, the project also signals the company’s broader play for lunar infrastructure.

Interlune’s work on the Small Business Technology Transfer Phase 1 contract, done in partnership with the Colorado School of Mines, demonstrates that the Seattle-based startup’s business model isn’t limited to helium-3. In the years ahead, the technologies pioneered by Interlune for resource extraction can also be used for building roads, base camps and other construction projects on the moon.

For example, the excavator that’s the focus of the NASA funding — known as the Scalable Implement for Lunar Trenching, or SILT — will support Interlune’ plan to sift through tons of lunar soil. But it will also support NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to establish a sustainable lunar presence in the 2030s.

“We’re looking at some other tools that would move regolith around, or prepare a site for making a road or building a radiation berm, burying a certain piece of infrastructure like a nuclear reactor,” Interlune CEO Rob Meyerson told GeekWire. “So, we’re very interested in participating in the Artemis program in broader ways, and we think the technology we’re developing for helium-3 extraction can support that.”

Lunar helium-3 extraction leads the list of Interlune’s priorities because Meyerson and the company’s other founders believe that could be a lucrative line of business.

Helium-3 can be used in quantum computers, medical imaging systems, nuclear weapon detectors and even future fusion reactors — but it’s so rare on Earth that it sells for up to $20 million per kilogram. Interlune is betting that it can make a profit by extracting helium-3 that’s deposited on the moon by solar wind.

“In the U.S., we produce one kilogram of helium-3 per year from tritium decay, give or take,” Meyerson said. “On the moon, we intend to extract 10 kilograms of helium-3 per year from our first helium-3 harvesting operation in the 2030s. And if we had helium-3 fusion, we would need 100 kilograms of helium-3 to power a city the size of Seattle for one year.”

The excavator development project builds on work that Interlune has conducted in partnership with Vermeer Corp., an Iowa-based industrial equipment manufacturer. Last year, the two companies unveiled a full-scale prototype for an excavator that would be capable of ingesting 100 metric tons of moon dirt in an hour.

Under the terms of the NASA contract, Interlune and the Colorado School of Mines will focus on optimizing the excavator’s design for the lunar environment and minimizing its power consumption. Work on the current phase of the project is due to wrap up by mid-2026, and if the results are sufficiently positive, Interlune could get the go-ahead for follow-up funding.

Meyerson cited other areas where Interlune’s work on the core technologies for its lunar harvesting system is attracting government support:

The Texas Space Commission provided a grant of up to $4.8 million to support a facility in Houston that focuses on creating better substitutes for moon rocks and soil. “The first one will be a regolith simulant that has implanted solar wind in it. … And we’re working on a device that will actually implant helium and/or hydrogen into the regolith,” Meyerson said.
The Department of the Air Force’s AFWERX program granted Interlune a $1.25 million contract to work on a new method to separate helium-3 from domestic helium for use in cooling quantum computers. “We’re working very closely with the Air Force Research Lab, and we’re also working with an industrial gas partner that we haven’t announced yet,” Meyerson said. “We would plug into their helium plant and extract helium-3, and so that’s a very important project for us.”
NASA’s TechFlights program awarded $348,000 to support reduced-gravity testing of Interlune’s regolith-processing system.
Interlune won a $246,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to work on its soil-sorting technology.

Interlune was founded in 2020 by Meyerson, a former president of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, and other aerospace veterans including Apollo 17 moonwalker Harrison Schmitt. The team has since grown to about 25 employees in Seattle, Houston and Washington, D.C.

So far the company has brought in $18 million in seed funding, and it recently reported raising more funds through a Simple Agreement for Future Equity, or SAFE. “We elected to do this because we wanted to raise some additional money in anticipation of some of these contract awards, like the one we’re talking about today. And we’ve got some more announcements coming,” Meyerson said.

A multispectral camera built by Interlune in partnership with NASA’s Ames Research Center could begin surveying lunar terrain for helium-3 as early as this summer. Interlune says it already has more than half a billion dollars’ worth of purchase orders and government contracts for helium-3.

Meyerson said helium-3 will be a “great first product” for Interlune.

“But once we get established on the moon, and we have all this infrastructure on the moon — excavating and sorting and extracting and separating — we can then start to evolve and add capability to produce water and split that into liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen,” he said. “We can extract metals, rare earths and silicon, and help with construction and excavation, like we’re doing under this NASA contract. Those are all important adjacent services that will help to build the in-space economy. And we think that is going to be huge.”

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Revealing the Top EdSurge K-12 Stories of 2025

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5 February 2026

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EdSurge readers are well-rounded students of education news.

In 2025, the K-12 articles that proved most popular with our audience reflected the breadth of the big trends gaining momentum in school districts and classrooms.

Even though U.S. education is largely governed by state policy, last year a significant source of change came from the White House. Two of our top 10 stories explored the nuances of executive orders signed by President Trump.

Of course, news about artificial intelligence topped the list, too. About a third of the most-read stories took readers past the hype to explore how educators and students are actually using AI tools.

A full half of the top EdSurge stories from 2025 reflected the diversity of today’s educators and students. Two examined the youth culture and learning preferences of Gen Alpha and Gen Z. Three others highlighted religion, neurodivergence and multilingual learners, respectively.

Finally, four of the top pieces came straight from the perspectives of practicing classroom instructors, demonstrating the resonance and power of educator voices.

Thanks for reading EdSurge in 2025, and cheers to a new year of education news.

1. Religion Is a Taboo Topic. I Discuss It in My Classroom Anyway.

By Hind Haddad

A Voices of Change fellow initially avoided discussing faith in her classroom. But she realized that her students – who mostly come from immigrant families who practice Islam – could benefit by connecting their daily learning with their personal and cultural identities.

2. Trump’s Executive Order on School Discipline Clashes With What Research Says Works

By Nadia Tamez-Robledo

Previously, national education policy aimed to remediate the fact that children who are racial minorities endure disproportionately high rates of punishment in public schools. The Trump administration aims to reverse course, arguing that older policies made schools less safe by incentivizing them to sweep student misconduct under the rug.

3. I’ve Taught Gen Z for Almost a Decade. I’m Split on the So-Called Gen Z ‘Split’

By Jeff LeBlanc

Are today’s youth divided, with half demonstrating high levels of motivation and the other half shrinking from school and career ambition? In this essay, an educator draws on his personal experience in the classroom to dismantle the notion, noting that students today seem to have high levels of intellectual curiosity.

4. Can ‘Math Therapists’ Make a Dent In America’s Declining Math Performance?

By Daniel Mollenkamp

Anxiety about math can pass from teacher to student. Instructional coaches are trying to break that cycle by instilling teachers with more confidence in their computational skills.

5. Why ‘Brain Rot’ Can Hurt Learning — and How One District Is Kicking It Out of School

By Nadia Tamez-Robledo

Educators have talked for years about students’ shortening attention spans and how kids struggle to follow the most basic of instructions. Even children know that their energy for learning is being drained by too much time spent scrolling social media and watching AI videos. What can be done about it?

6. Trump Executive Order Calls for Artificial Intelligence to Be Taught in Schools

By Rebecca Koenig

From the White House came a directive to promote “appropriate integration of AI into education” to “ensure the United States remains a global leader in this technological revolution,” through teaching students and training teachers to use AI in order to improve education outcomes. Education leaders offered mixed first impressions about the order.

7. How I Navigate the Classroom as a Neurodivergent Teacher

By Fatema Elbakoury

How to offer students presence while struggling with anxiety and imposter syndrome? A Voices of Change fellow explains how extensive lesson preparation and organization help her succeed at the head of the classroom with her neurodivergence.

8. Art Saved My Life When I Was a Student. Now, It’s Helping My Multilingual Learners.

By Edgar Miguel Grajeda

The visual arts have the power to transcend language barriers and help all students, especially multilingual learners, thrive in school. A Voices of Change fellow explains how.

9. Teachers Believe That AI Is Here to Stay in Education. How It Should Be Taught Is Debatable.

By Nadia Tamez-Robledo

The life cycle of teachers’ feelings about AI started at confusion, then fear about it threatening their jobs, followed by worries about students cheating but also a desire to see how the technology can be useful with lesson planning and other administrative tasks.

10. An AI Wish List From Teachers: What They Actually Want It to Do

By Ellen Ullman

While edtech vendors race to integrate AI into every aspect of teaching and learning, educators are drawing clearer boundaries: AI should save them time, not replace their judgment. They want support for differentiation, not decision-making. Most of all, they want tools that align with the values and realities of teaching.

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This big Pixel 10 Pro price drop makes it a contender for the best phone

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5 February 2026

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The Google Pixel 10 Pro is an excellent phone, and it’s even more tempting at this new price.

With an RRP of $999, you can now bring the six-month-old Pixel 10 Pro home for a much more wallet-friendly price of $799. That’s 20% off the 128GB, in any of the three colour choices.

That saving isn’t too far away from the Black Friday $749 price, so you didn’t miss out too much on not grabbing it back then.