Alexa+ Review

Alexa+ is Amazon's rebuild of its voice assistant around large language models from its own Nova family and from Anthropic. It opened in early access in March 2025, reached every US customer on February 4, 2026, and is free with Prime or 19.99 dollars a month without it, with a limited free text chat at Alexa.com. The change from the old Alexa is immediate: you speak naturally, follow up or change course, and it keeps the thread.

Most reviewers call it the best smart home voice assistant available. It understands a request to turn on the light over the sink, builds routines from a plain description, searches Ring camera footage, and fields general questions far better than the old Alexa did. Testers found it copes unusually well with children. Agent jobs such as booking a ride or a table work often enough to impress and fail often enough to check.

The faults are familiar. It occasionally states wrong facts with confidence, its memory of shared documents is patchy, device discovery can stumble, the companion app remains buggy and clunky, and Echo Show screens still carry full screen ads. It is not a coding tool, which explains the low coding grade. For a Prime household full of Echo speakers it is a clear upgrade at no extra cost.