Alexa+, Amazon’s enhanced digital assistant powered by generative AI, has been rolled out to over 100,000 users, according to CEO Andy Jassy during the company’s earnings call on 1 May 2025, TechCrunch reported.
While significantly fewer than the 600 million Alexa devices in use, the company is making progress on implementing Alexa+, which was first announced in February. Amazon previously stated Alexa+ would be released in stages over the coming months.
In his opening remarks, Jassy described Alexa+ as one of the first action-oriented AI agents for customers. However, he acknowledged this technology remains “primitive” and “inaccurate.” According to the Amazon CEO, most multi-step AI agents currently have a low accuracy rate ranging from 30 % to 60 %. Jassy expressed the goal for the company’s web-browsing agent, Nova Act, which powers Alexa+, to achieve 90 % accuracy in this area.
Amazon’s new digital assistant aims to enable users to interact with it more naturally and will eventually feature agentic capabilities, allowing it to use third-party apps on users’ behalf. Alexa+ is designed to generate unique responses on the fly, similar to the voice modes in OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, rather than relying on the pre-programmed responses of earlier Alexa and Siri systems.
However, as The Washington Post noted at launch, the current version of Alexa+ lacks several key features demonstrated by the company in February. According to the article, Alexa+ initially could not access third-party apps like GrubHub, generate bedtime stories for children or brainstorm gift ideas. It remains unclear when these functionalities will be integrated into Alexa+.
“We have a lot more functionality that we plan to add in coming months,” Jassy said on the call.
AI Agents
AI agents are autonomous systems designed to make decisions and take actions to achieve specific goals. Operating independently in dynamic environments, they often use reinforcement learning or advanced planning algorithms. Self-driving cars, which analyse surroundings to make driving decisions, and automated stock-trading systems that execute trades based on market trends are common examples.
Amazon’s rollout of Alexa+ appears to be progressing faster than Apple’s new LLM-powered Siri. When asked about the latest Siri delays during Apple’s earnings call on 1 May 2025—which coincided with Amazon’s—CEO Tim Cook stated that the company needed “more time to complete the work.”
