Amazon says Alexa+, the new and improved Alexa announced Wednesday, comes with a “model-essential” system that always uses the “best” AI model for specific tasks.
On stage at a New York City press event, Amazon VP Daniel Rausch explained that Alexa+ drives Bedrock, the company’s cloud platform designed to allow organizations to experiment with generative AI models, into a variety of capabilities.
Among the models using Alexa+ are Nova, Amazon’s family of in-house-generated AI models, and close partners and collaborators.
Claude supports the power of Amazon’s next-generation AI assistant Alexa+.
Amazon and Anthropic have been working closely over the past year, with @Mikeyk leading a team that helped Amazon get the full benefits of Claude’s capabilities. pic.twitter.com/yi0abtnzke
– Humanity (@anthropicai) February 26, 2025
“[W]e has built something refined [model] Routing System [to match] Amazon has described in a blog post that each customer demands the best model for the task at hand, balancing all the requirements of a crisp, conversational experience.
This “model-essential” approach allows for what could be considered a “agent” feature. Alexa+ is leveraging a new system called “experts” for specific tasks, Amazon says. Experts who coordinate and execute Amazon services and third-party services, including the music generation tool from AI startup Suno.
On the first day, Rausch said that Alexa+ will work with “tens of thousands of devices and services.
Some of these include news services. Amazon says it has partnered with publications such as Time, Reuters and the Associated Press to provide information on answers related to current events, financial market movements, and more.
It only damages the surface of what Alexa+ can do. According to Rausch, Alexa+ can navigate websites and complete tasks on your behalf. For example, you can search the web to find a professional who repairs a broken oven, or contact a repair shop directly.
“Alexa takes a few minutes to navigate the website [and it] He’s back and says it’s over,” Rausch said on stage. “I’ll receive notifications over the phone [when Alexa is finished.]”
Experts also allow Alexa+ to coordinate multiple services at once, Rausch said. For example, make a dinner reservation through OpenTable, book Uber at the restaurant, and text your plans to contacts. Developers can take advantage of this feature via the Alexa AI Multi-Agent SDK, which will be launched soon in Preview.
