Amazon Alexa+ event liveblog: New AI services and more

In the meantime, thank you again for joining us on our liveblog of Amazon's Alexa+ event today. We hope it was as scintillating for you as it was for us. Send us any questions about Alexa+, follow our social media accounts (via the handle @engadget) and tune in to the Engadget Podcast tomorrow morning at about 11am ET on our YouTube channel. We'll be diving deeper into Amazon's announcements from today.

Sorry for the long absence, but our team was quite quickly ushered into a demo area to check out the new Alexa+. In general, we didn't see a lot that was different from what was shown in the presentation. We watched as different Amazon executives ordered groceries via Alexa+ and Amazon Fresh, saw other execs book seats at restaurants and make reservations with professional repair services or send documents to family members. We're still making sense of today's announcements and will likely publish related coverage on our site later, so do check it out.

I still can't believe we didn't get some kind of new Echo, but I guess AI really does rule the world now.

We have one more video recapping what we've seen, but that seems to be all otherwise. So, no new devices then.

Early access to Alexa+ will start to roll out next month, and in waves over subsequent months. It'll work on "almost every" Alexa device Amazon has shipped.

Alexa+ is free to Prime members, but $20 per month for everyone else.

Panay says "we're moving the world from chatbots to something entirely new." He says along with Alexa+ comes a new phone app and Alexa.com website.

Here's Panay again to wrap up.

I should note that we've had a few moments over the course of this where Alexa+ starts talking before the presenter is finished.

Rausch is now giving a look at future nuances for Alexa+. He uses Amazon Fresh to request various groceries and ingredients, and we see Rausch's cart update in real time.

He shows of an integration between Alexa+ and the app Suno that lets him create a romantic country song about his cat. (Yeah.)

Rausch says he believes the future will be full of AI agents, and that in a world full of AI, those agents should interact with each other.

Rausch says "a true agent does not require babysitting" in an open tab. So now we're moving onto a demo where he requests Alexa to find a professional that can fix a broken oven in his home. The assistant then pulls up a list of businesses that can help and makes sure to confirm the details of the resulting appointment. (How comfortable all of this is on an Alexa device that doesn't have a display is another question.)

You can finalize plans like those by saying "Alexa, book it."

He uses Alexa+ to draft up and schedule a text to notify his friend about that booking.

The next demo here has Rausch booking a reservation and a ride with Alexa+ by tapping into its OpenTable and Uber integrations.

Rausch notes how Alexa+ draws on "hundreds of specialized experts" for its knowledge. He says on day one, it'll work with "tens of thousands" of other partners. I see Uber, Sonos, Samsung, Xbox and a whole bunch of others on the screen.

How did that go again, Sam? (I kid.)

Again, the demo is really hammering home how you can interact with Alexa more conversationally that you would in the past. He gets some details about some of the Red Sox's signings in the offseason, asks to pull up tickets and then shows how Alexa can set up a ticket monitor and keep an eye out for cheaper seats for a specific game.

All this sports talk has seen our team get more lively and engaged than they have been at any other point of today's presentation lol.

As a Yankee fan, I would just like to point out that Rausch conveniently forgot to mention who played in the World Series last year.

Rausch, who says he is a Red Sox fan, asks Alexa how many World Series titles the Red Sox have won this decade compared to the Yankees. (As a native Bostonian, I am having fun now.)

He's going through more of the technical details behind Alexa+. He shouts out Amazon Nova and Anthropic but calls it "model-agnostic."

Daniel Rausch, VP of Alexa and Echo, is on stage now.

We see a video of kids basically using Alexa to create little fantastical stories, with the assistant requesting info and adapting on the fly.

Segal is announcing Explore with Alexa and Stories with Alexa. They're designed to "inspire a kids' curiosity and creativity."

Segal is essentially showing off how Alexa can read a calendar, set reminders and quickly transition between different topics in natural language, based on information you've given it.

Segal says you can now share "just about anything" with Alexa, from emails to PDFs to photos hand-written notecards. She asks Alexa if she can solar to her house based on a HOA document she's shared earlier. Alexa then responds that she can, recalling a few details from that doc (presumably) along the way.

Here's Mara Segal, Director of Alexa.

"Have you seen any packages around the house yesterday," Panay asks, and Alexa brings up corresponding clips of deliveries. It even notes what's in the packages, it sounded like?

Moving onto Ring integration, Panay is basically using Alexa to check his video feed outside of his house. He asks Alexa if "anyone has walked the dog in the last couple of days," and the assistant pulls up clips his camera recorded of people walking his husky.

That whole bit becomes a little less useful if you need Amazon Music and Prime Video to make it work, but it's neat.

Now he moves the song over the Fire TV set up on the stage. From there, he asks Alexa to "jump to the scene in the movie" and, after one hiccup, it starts up A Star is Born and plays the scene where that song is featured.

Panay says how "there's no more Alexa speak" with Alexa+. You just talk as you would, and it'll do what you need. (Of course, we'll have to see about that ourselves.)