Alexa Plus became available to more people with Alexa.com

The Alexa.com website, which was previously only available to a limited group of users, is now available to a larger number of people in the form of a chatbot to an artificial intelligence assistant. Alexa Plus have access The service, which is not yet publicly available and stable for all users, allows users to manage daily tasks, upload documents, generate images and text, and even control smart home devices and Ring cameras through the browser.

With this change, Alexa Plus is now not only available on smart speakers and mobile phones, but also presents itself as a powerful alternative to advanced chatbots such as Gemina, Claude and ChatGPT by offering browser-based capabilities and integrated management.

According to reports, the new Alexa.com interface will allow users to access smart home controls through a browser. This feature sets Alexa Plus apart from many agent-based chatbots that focus more on conversation, search, and task management. Users can control lights, thermostats and connected cameras like Ring from the same browser window and access other assistant features at the same time.

Amazon hasn’t introduced Alexa as an AI agent, but Alexa Plus’ new capabilities expand as Amazon limits third-party automation tools on its platform. In November, the company ordered Perplexity’s Comet browser to cease operations.

Amazon launched a limited preview of Alexa Plus in the US last year. For the production version of Alexa Plus, the company has partnered with Anthropic, the developer of the cloud assistant, to provide some of the necessary language processing power. This partnership brings Alexa Plus into a new generation of assistants based on large language models.

Amazon has announced in a statement that Alexa Plus has improved significantly over the past 9 months. The company explained that Alexa Plus is now integrated with tens of thousands of services and devices and serves millions of users. According to the company’s report, users interact with this assistant twice as often, make three times as many purchases, and ask for recipes five times as often.

Amazon has designed the technical architecture of Alexa Plus in such a way that it does not depend on a single language model and uses the combination of several models to perform different tasks in order to maintain the balance between accuracy, speed and cost. The Alexa.com web interface is also built on this foundation and transforms the user experience by allowing interaction in the browser and access to more extensive features.

Amazon emphasized that the development of Alexa Plus in the web environment has not changed the company’s privacy policies. A company spokesperson explained to Decrypt that “Alexa Plus is designed like our other products; Our goal is to create an attractive experience for users while fully protecting their privacy and security. Users can review their interaction history, shared files, voice recordings, and web activity, and have complete control over important settings through the Alexa Privacy Dashboard.

In addition to text interaction and conversation, the Alexa.com interface also provides the possibility of generating images from text. Users can receive created images by writing or saying a subject and save or share them. This feature puts Alexa Plus alongside other image-generating assistants and extends its capabilities beyond text responses.

Alexa Plus on the web also allows you to manage smart home reminders and notifications. Users can create and edit personal reminders, family notifications and alerts related to smart devices. These settings are synchronized with the user account and applied to Echo speakers and the Alexa app.

One of the key features of Alexa.com is shopping and Amazon shopping cart management. Users can search for products, check other people’s reviews, update their shopping cart and complete orders to the final stage. This feature also includes orders from Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods, and Alexa Plus provides new and tailored offers by analyzing users’ purchase history.

The new Alexa.com interface also allows users to upload documents, make reservations, and manage daily tasks. Users can upload documents to summarize or extract key points, make reservations for restaurants or different services, and organize their to-do list. These activities are done through a conversation with Alexa, and Alexa Plus is able to manage several steps of a process consecutively.

Alexa Plus supports typing and speech in the web environment, and information about the conversation between Echo devices, the Alexa app, and the desktop browser is saved. This synchronization allows users to transfer their conversation from one device to another without interruption, making Alexa Plus work as a collaborative and integrated smart assistant in the Amazon ecosystem.

Access to Alexa.com is currently only available to Alexa Plus Early Access users. Amazon has not announced an exact time for the public release, only mentioning that it is in the process of gathering feedback from early users. It is expected that after improving and stabilizing the features and fixing possible problems, wider access will be enabled for users in more markets.