is a senior reviewer focused on smart home and connected tech, with over twenty years of experience. She has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
One of the best features of Amazon’s new Alexa Plus is that I don’t have to “speak Alexa” anymore. I’ve been testing the voice assistant for about a week now, and it understands what I say, regardless of how I say it — there’s no more need for precise phrasing to get Alexa to do what I want. This big shift underpins another headline feature of the revamped generative AI-powered assistant that I’ve been testing: agentic AI. But this one needs work.
The idea is I can talk to Alexa Plus as I would to a real personal assistant and ask it to do tasks, such as reserving a restaurant for my friend’s birthday, finding an electrician to fix my broken sprinkler pump, or booking tickets to a Chris Isaak concert.
The assistant can then act as an “AI agent” and navigate online services on my behalf to book everything for me. Combined with better calendar management and the ability to remember things you tell it, Alexa’s agentic AI has the potential to make the assistant much more useful.
Alexa’s AI agent features are neither broad enough nor seamless enough to replace my real-life personal assistant: me
At least in theory. In reality, it’s too limited. Alexa Plus relies on partnerships with specific services; it can’t just roam the web and do my bidding. As of now, that includes Ticketmaster, OpenTable, Uber, and Thumbtack. While impressively, Alexa did manage to complete several steps, overall, the AI agent’s current features are neither broad enough nor seamless enough to replace my real-life personal assistant: me.
Alexa Plus is still in an Early Access beta phase, and Amazon says more integrations are coming soon. These include ordering groceries by voice (via “several grocery providers in the US”), delivery through Grubhub, and booking spa visits through Vagaro.
These may be more useful to me, especially grocery ordering. I already use Alexa for my shopping list, but I then have to put everything into my Harris Teeter shopping app for pickup or delivery. If Alexa could take that list and add it to a service like Instacart, it would cut out a chunk of work for me.
Booking a concert was mostly a smooth experience.
Of the three agentic experiences I tested, the best was booking a ticket to an event through Ticketmaster. After a dodgy start — when I asked about sports events and was told about a youth basketball training session — I tried again. “What events are there in Charleston next month that you can buy me tickets for?”
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