Amazon Alexa+ finally lands in the UK: 8 neat things it can do

Last year Amazon announced Alexa+, the new-fangled and smarter version of its AI assistant.

Good news (if you're not terrified by the very concept of artificial intelligence): it has finally arrived in the UK.

From today, you can try Alexa+ as part of an “early access” programme. Buy one of Amazon’s latest Echo smart devices to get involved. Or if you already have one that’s supported, we’re told you’ll receive an invite to give it a go too.

What’s the damage? It's free during the Early Access period. And after you can pay £19.99 a month for access to the Alexa+ service or — the method that makes a whole lot more sense — get it as part of a Prime membership.

But what can Alexa+ do? It’s basically the more modern chatbot-like version of the Alexa digital assistant, which has after all been around for a decade at this point in the UK — it turns ten this autumn.

ChatGPT botherers may think they know the drill, but here are 8 things Alexa+ can do that might help make your life run that little bit easier.

The one caveat: don’t expect miracles on day one. Even in Amazon’s own demo a few technical software and hardware gremlins made Alexa+ react not quite as expected, so who knows what you’ll get in your London studio flat.

1. It can book restaurants

Third-party integrations have always been a calling card of Amazon Alexa, filed under the Skills banner. But Alexa+ looks like it will make restaurant bookings as simple as speaking a sentence or two.

Alexa+ hooks up with Opentable for restaurant bookings, SevenRooms for hotel bookings and Treatwell for spa treatments and other self care-style appointment bookings. You can also of course use Alexa+ to find the venues in the first place too.

2. Talk any old rubbish and Alexa+ can (fingers crossed) understand

The key thing to get your head around with Alexa+ is it’s made using the LLM-style tech that powers today’s fluent-sounding chatbots. Y’know, the kind some folks find so convincing they fall in love with them.

This means we’ll largely see an end to hitting an Alexa brick wall because you didn’t phrase something in exactly the right way. Alexa+ is much more adept at styling it out, sounding more human — for better and worse if you’re not fully bought into this stuff — and taking important context into account as standard.

3. Alexa+ remembers your friends’ dietary quirks

One of the key context clues we saw in action in our time testing out Alexa+ was how it can remember what your friends’ dietary preferences are.

So, for example, if you have a dinner party in the calendar and you’ve told Alexa+ before that, say, Sandra is a vegetarian (and she’s coming), when you ask for suggested recipes, it will take that into account when throwing up some results.

4. It adds events to your calendar

A simple and obvious one, but perhaps destined to become one of the top uses for Alexa+, is in managing your calendar.

You can ask the chatbot to add events, and of course as it about what’s coming up in your planner. This is old-school stuff at this point, but it’s our hope the newly natural-feeling Alexa+ will make the whole process feel a whole lot less clunky.

5. Alexa+ can check your Ring camera 

One of the big benefits of companies having a whole ecosystem of devices is they can be made to work together like pals. That’s how Ring cameras and Alexa+ get on. For those who may have missed the news, Amazon acquired Ring back in 2018 for upwards of a billion dollars.

In practice this means you’ll be able to ask Alexa+ whether your dog is in the garden, or if the courier did indeed turn up yesterday like they said they did. This is basically joining the dots between smart chatbot tech and the computer vision stuff Ring and its rivals have been working on for years — letting them recognise real objects even with a modest quality video feed.

6. It can order items (only from Amazon, for now)

This one is pretty obvious. You can use Alexa+ to order items, not to mention research them beforehand.

One way to test the limits of this one will be to see quite how far you can push the conversational engine. Will Alexa+ really know what you’re chatting about if you ask for your “usual order”? Amazon suggests it will, but we’ll believe that when we see it in action.

The main limitation for now is you can only shop from Amazon. It makes sense, of course, but Amazon made it sound as though we’ll be able to shop from elsewhere in the future too.

There are already integrations with takeaway services like JustEat and Uber Eats, mind. Pizzas and curry aren’t limited to Amazon, thankfully.

7. Alexa+ can notify you about price drops

If you have a compatible Amazon Alexa smart display, you’ll be able to do a decent amount of product-buying research over Alexa+. Ask for coffee machines, say, and it will rifle through the Amazon drawers to see what’s there.

One useful extra is you can get alerts when a product hits a certain price. You could already do this using the Amazon app, or the Amazon Rufus assistant. But now you have another option.

8. It can understand the UK’s regional accents

OK, so here’s another one we’ll believe when we see it working. Alexa+ is designed to handle the UK’s many regional and (let’s be honest) at times pretty baffling accents and dialects.

“The UK and Ireland have 40 dialects, the most of any English-speaking country,” says Trevor Wood, Lead Scientist at the Amazon Cambridge office responsible for localising Alexa+’s skills for a UK audience.

This involves what Wood calls “accent-neutral speech representation” to let it cut through and get to what you’re on about, without ignoring all those delightful regional variations. But we’ve been to parts of the country where we’ve barely been able to twig what a local is saying, so we’ll believe it when we hear and see it. Game on, Alexa+...

Alexa+ is available on compatible Echo devices in Early Access from March 19th, while a web version is due to launch in the next couple of weeks. Features specific to Fire TV sticks are expeced to launch in the coming weeks too.

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