The BMW iX3 2026 voice assistant will be powered by Alexa +

BMW finally gets its next-generation Alexa voice assistant, and it comes with an AI upgrade.

Amazon said Monday that the 2026 BMW iX3 will be equipped with Alexa+, the same generative artificial intelligence technology that was launched in millions of the e-commerce giant’s smart devices last year. This will be the first car to come with Amazon’s next-generation voice assistant, the companies announced during the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

This launch is part of Amazon’s effort to bring its LLM-powered voice and digital assistant to every device — whether handheld or in the driver’s seat — that consumers touch. Alexa+ is already on more than 600 million devices. Cars are next on the list.

Bringing a dedicated version of Alexa+ into the BMW iX3 will be an important test for Amazon. Automakers have struggled for years to bring a voice assistant into vehicles that can handle complex functions and requests that don’t end with a driver screaming in frustration. Efforts to develop natural language processing — a form of artificial intelligence that allows computers to understand and respond to human speech — have been underway for more than a decade. Despite the progress that has been made, it is still easy for humans to disrupt these systems.

The partnership between BMW and Amazon’s Alexa+ has been three years in the making.

BMW announced in 2022 that Amazon Alexa will be the basis of its next-generation voice assistant. This means that BMW will not only integrate Alexa into its cars, but will use Amazon’s technology platform known as Alexa Custom Assistant to build its own customized version. That timeline has been extended as Amazon works on an automotive version of Alexa+, a voice assistant developed and powered by large language models that promise to deliver conversations that are fluid and natural, like talking to a human.

Alexa+ is built using Amazon Bedrock, a service that allows AWS customers to build applications using generative AI models from Amazon and other third-party partners. Customers, such as BMW, can customize the app using their own data.

The end result, according to Amazon, is a voice assistant that can analyze complex requests, think through the steps, and take action across different services. For example, Amazon says users can start a conversation with an Alexa+-enabled Echo speaker at home and continue it in their BMW. Once inside the car, the user can make requests through the Alexa+ assistant that would typically require opening different apps, such as music, navigation, and the home security system.