GoKawiilIn Brief
Amazon is bringing its new AI-powered conversational assistant, Alexa+, to the U.K., the first country to get the AI assistant outside of North America.
The company is currently letting users in the U.K. try out Alexa+ for free via an early access program. Users who buy the new Amazon Echo will receive an invite for the early access program, and the company says it plans to enable Alexa+ for “hundreds of thousands” of customers in the coming weeks.
Once the early access program ends, Prime subscribers will get to use Alexa+ for free, and non-Prime users will need to pay £19.99 per month. The company hasn’t specified when the early access program ends.
Alexa+ works with Amazon’s new Echo devices, Fire TV, and the Alexa app, and can carry conversational context from one device to another. The company plans to extend support for Alexa+ to browsers as well.
Amazon said it has customized Alexa+ for U.K. customers, and the assistant can understand local context as well as commonly used phrases.
“Local teams, including engineers, linguists, and speech scientists at Amazon’s Tech Hub in Cambridge, UK, have used different techniques—such as reinforcement learning, accent-neutral speech representations, and regional embeddings—to make sure Alexa+ genuinely understands British customers,” the company said in a blog post.
Amazon noted that users can ask for suggestions from services such as OpenTable, JustEat, and Treatwell. They can also get their news from sources like The Independent, The Guardian, Press Association, and Future Publishing.
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