Amazon on Wednesday launched its new generative AI-powered personal assistant Alexa+ in India that claims to better understand context and natural conversation in English, Hindi, and Hinglish, with more Indian languages to follow soon.
It is available for free under early access across eligible Echo smart speakers, smart displays, Fire TV streaming devices, and the Alexa mobile app with browser access coming soon. “Teams of scientists, linguists, and engineers across Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, and Chennai developed core Alexa+ technology: from speech recognition tuned for the acoustics of real Indian homes to language models that handle code: mixed Hinglish and culturally nuanced requests. Alexa+ claims to learn customer preferences, understands family routines, and adapts to individual households. Through voice ID and visual ID, it claims to recognise family members and can offer tailor responses. It can also be used to shop on Amazon Now where user can place order by voice. After early access ends, Alexa+ will stay free for Prime members.
Alexa+ is based on Amazon Bedrock, using new architecture that connects over 70 large language models including Amazon-made models and models from Anthropic to hundreds of services and devices. For Prime Lite, Prime Shopping Edition plan members, and all non-Prime customers, Alexa+ access will not auto-renew and will be available either as a standalone subscription for ₹2,000 per month or through Prime plan.
Amazon said that this new conversational assistant can better understand Indian style of speaking.
