Amazon’s AI assistant comes to the web with Alexa.com

Amazon’s redesign of its digital assistant, based on AI, now known as Alexa+arrives on the Web. On Monday, at the start of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company announced the official launch of a new website, Alexa.com, which is now rolling out to all Alexa+ Early Access customers. The site will allow customers to use Alexa+ online, just as you can today with other AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.

While Alexa-powered devices, including Amazon’s Echo smart speakers and displays, have a well-established footprint with more than 600 million devices sold worldwide, Amazon believes that for its AI assistant to be competitive, it will need to be everywhere – not just in the home, but also on the phone and on the web.

Additionally, the extension could later give anyone a way to interact with Alexa+, even if they don’t have a device in their home.

As part of this expansion, Amazon is updating its Alexa mobile app, which will now offer a more “agent-oriented” experience. Or, in other words, it’s putting a chatbot-style interface on the app’s homepage, making it look more like a typical AI chatbot. (Although you could previously chat with Alexa in the app, the focus is now on chat, while other features take a backseat.)

On the Alexa.com website, customers can use Alexa+ for common tasks, such as exploring complex topics, creating content, and planning travel itineraries. However, Amazon aims to differentiate its assistant from others by focusing on families and their needs at home. This includes controlling smart devices, like you already could with the original Alexa, but it also means doing things like updating the family calendar or to-do list, making dinner reservations, adding the groceries you need to your Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods cart, finding recipes and saving them to a library, or even planning family movie night with personalized recommendations.

More recently, Amazon has been integrate more services with Alexa+including the addition of Angi, Expedia, Square and Yelp, which will join existing apps such as Fodor’s, OpenTable, Suno, Ticketmaster, Thumbtack and Uber.

The Alexa.com website features a navigation sidebar for quicker access to your most-used Alexa features, so you can pick up where you left off on tasks like adjusting the thermostat, checking appointments in your calendar, viewing shopping lists, and more.

Additionally, Amazon aims to convince customers to share their personal documents, emails, and calendar access with Alexa+, so that its AI can become a sort of hub for managing events at home, from children’s school vacations and soccer schedules to doctor’s appointments and other things families need to remember — like when the dog got its last rabies shot, or what day the neighbor’s backyard barbecue is.

This is an area where Amazon will need to expand, as it doesn’t have its own productivity suite or the wealth of personal data that competitors like Google already have for their own customers. Instead, Amazon relied on tools to upload and download files to Alexa+ so its AI could track them. This too will now be a feature available on Alexa.com, and the information you share can be displayed on the Echo Show screen, where it can also be managed.

This ability to manage a family’s personal data could be Alexa’s biggest selling point, if it succeeds.

“Seventy-six percent of what customers use Alexa+ for no other AI can do,” says Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Echo at Amazon, in an interview with TechCrunch. “And I think that’s a really interesting statistic about Alexa+ for two reasons.

He continues: “First, because customers rely on Alexa to make unique things. You know, you can send a photo of an old family recipe to Alexa, then talk about the recipe while you cook it in your kitchen, replace the ingredients with ones you have at home, and finish the job.”

But it notes that another 24% use Alexa to do things that other AIs can do – this could indicate that they are shifting more of their AI use to Alexa+.

Alexa.com will initially only be available to Early Access customers who sign in with their Amazon account. Amazon has been rolling out early access regularly since its Alexa+ debut early last year.

Rausch tells us that more than 10 million consumers now have access to Alexa+ and that they have two to three times more conversations with Alexa+ than with the original Alexa assistant. Concretely, they shop three times more with Alexa+ and use recipes five times more than before, he says. Large smart home customers also use Alexa+ 50% more for smart home control, compared to the original Alexa.

However, on social media and online forums, there have been complaints about Alexa+ hiccups and errors. But Rausch believes complaints are overrepresented online. He says the number of people who disengage from the Alexa+ experience after trying it averages in the single digits, or “actually… almost none.”

“Ninety-seven percent of Alexa devices support Alexa+, and we now see customers using it across all these years and generations of devices,” Rausch adds. “We support all of Alexa’s original capabilities, carrying over the tens of thousands of services and devices that Alexa has already integrated with into the Alexa+ experience.”