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

Amazon’s AI-powered fix for its digital assistant, now known as Alexa+, is coming to 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 do today with other AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.

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

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

In connection with this expansion, Amazon is updating its Alexa mobile app, which will now provide a more “advanced agent” experience. Or in other words, a chatbot-style interface is placed on the app’s homepage, making it look more like a typical AI-powered chatbot. (While before you could chat with Alexa in the app, now the focus is on chat — with other features taking secondary importance.)

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

Recently, Amazon has integrated more services with Alexa+, including adding Angi, Expedia, Square, and Yelp, which will join existing apps like Fodor’s, OpenTable, Suno, Ticketmaster, Thumbtack, and Uber.

Alexa.com 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 your thermostat, checking your calendar for appointments, reviewing 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 becomes a kind of hub for managing what’s going on at home, from kids’ school vacations and soccer schedules to doctor’s appointments and other things families need to remember — like when a dog got its last rabies shot, or what day the neighbor’s backyard barbecue is.

This is where Amazon will need to expand, because it doesn’t have its own productivity stack or the wealth of personal data that competitors like Google have for their customers. Instead, Amazon relied on tools to redirect files and upload them to Alexa+ so its AI could track them. This will also be a feature now available on Alexa.com, and the information you share can be viewed 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 implemented correctly.

“Seventy-six percent of what customers use is Alexa+, which 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 do unique things. You know, you can send a photo of an old family recipe to Alexa and then talk about the recipe as you cook it in your kitchen, substituting ingredients for what you have at home, and getting the job done along the way.”

But it notes that another 24% use Alexa to do things other AI systems can do, which may indicate 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 steadily rolling out early access since Alexa+ debuted early last year.

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

However, across social media and online forums, there are complaints about Alexa+ bugs and bugs. But Rausch believes complaints are overrepresented online. He says the number of people who have opted out of Alexa+ after trying it is on average in the low single digits, or “effectively…almost nothing.”

“Ninety-seven percent of Alexa devices support Alexa+, and we’re now seeing in customer adoption that they’re using Alexa across that many years and that many generations of devices,” Rausch adds. “We support all of Alexa’s native capabilities, with tens of thousands of Alexa-integrated services and devices already ported to the Alexa+ experience.”