After launching in the U.S. in March, Amazon is expanding its new digital assistant presence in Canada.
It's an upgrade to regular Alexa that could cost $27.99 per month or be included as part of an existing Prime membership, making it relatively cheap for many Canadians who already have Prime subscriptions.
If you buy new Amazon hardware, like the new Echo Show 8 or 11, you'll have access to the new Alexa right away. People with older hardware will have to wait, however, although Amazon says tens of thousands of people will get access each week.
To improve the assistant, Amazon tweaked the new AI to sound distinctly Canadian, but aside from adding various stereotypes like mentioning hockey, mispronouncing Zamboni, and claiming that his favorite Timbit is the one that's not even sold in Canada anymore, to me it mostly sounded like the voice of a generic robot.
Like many other artificial intelligence tools, Amazon has demonstrated its ability to extract information from emails or photos, including dates and context. However, you need to forward emails to your own Alexa+ email address, which you will find in the Alexa app.
The new assistant can also remember your preferences. At launch, the company asked for some dinner recommendations and was able to remember that one of the people in the Amazon family account didn't like mushrooms.
Amazon says that in the US, customers use Alexa+ twice as often as regular Alexa. However, time will tell if this will continue in Canada. The company said Canada is a huge market for music streaming on Echo hardware, with 50 million hours of music streamed each month. With Alexa+, you can ask for lyrics or describe a song, and it will do a better job of playing the song you want.
Overall, from what I've seen, it appears to give you a slightly wider range of responses than what I'm used to with regular Alexa, but at the end of the day, it does a lot of the same tasks around the house as regular Alexa. It plays music, controls smart home technology, and can update you on the weather or news. It seems to do it all a little better.
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