Amazon has long dealt with the reality that owners of its Echo smart speakers were not using its voice-controlled assistant, Alexa, to buy things as it had hoped. The tech giant has not given up on that dream. Its AI assistant, Alexa+, is getting new shopping-enabled features in the U.S. and Canada starting today, including a shopping hub, tools to add items to recent orders, and personalized recommendations.
The company has already been working on features that make Alexa+ more of a shopping assistant. These include abilities like automated deal tracking and automatic purchases. The deal tracking feature lets you set Alexa to alert you when items in your cart or list drop below a certain price. If you also have automatic purchases set up, Alexa can immediately order an item when it reaches that target price.
Now, Amazon says it is turning its Echo devices with a screen—the Echo Show 15 and 21—into a shopping hub with an interface called the “Shopping Essentials” experience. From this dashboard, shoppers can track deliveries in real time, see information about recent orders, get reminders about household essentials they need to reorder, and view their shopping list and saved items. The screen also lets shoppers tap to see more products, add items directly to their cart, and then check out.
To access the new experience, Amazon users can say “Alexa, where’s my stuff?” or “Open Shopping Essentials.” Soon, a shopping widget will be available to add to the Echo device’s home screen as well.
Another new feature rolling out now will allow Alexa device owners to add items to an upcoming delivery at any time until the item leaves the warehouse. This builds on a similar feature recently added to Amazon’s retail website and app, so it is not necessarily an Alexa+ exclusive, but the feature was not previously live on Alexa devices.
Alexa+ is also gaining the ability to recommend gifts. You will be able to describe who you are shopping for, or the occasion, and Alexa+ will display product suggestions on the screen, organized into categories.
Amazon says Alexa+ is now available to tens of millions of customers, and these new features are live for users in the U.S. and Canada. While not everyone has been happy with Alexa+, the company says the percentage of users who downgraded back to the AI-free interface remains in the very low single digits.