A peek behind Amazon's new Alexa

Alexa+ is rolling out, and Fortune Tech Correspondent Jason Del Rey put the new tech to the test to see what it can do.

Transcript

00:00Alexa, did I stump you?

00:03Not at all. Let me check for soccer tickets for you.

00:06NYC FC2 is playing Toronto FC2 on Wednesday, July 16th.

00:10I think it's actually pronounced NYC FC, but maybe you're right.

00:14I'm not actually a fan of that team.

00:16Amazon is starting to roll out the new version of Alexa called Alexa Plus.

00:21This is supposed to be a smarter Alexa and one that doesn't just answer questions,

00:26but also accomplish tasks for you, maybe ordering an Uber, making a restaurant reservation.

00:32I got early access to Alexa Plus.

00:35I've had a little bit of time to play around with Alexa Plus, both myself,

00:39also my nine-year-old daughter as well.

00:41And we've tried a bunch of things.

00:43My daughter really wanted Alexa Plus to draw or create an image for her.

00:48And we went through many, many iterations of that with mostly pretty spot on success.

00:54There are definitely some bugs that need to be worked out though.

00:58I've sped up my speaking rate.

01:00How's this?

01:01After having some time with the new Alexa Plus, I was able to meet with Panos Panay,

01:05who basically runs Alexa at Amazon and all of the devices that Amazon makes.

01:11And I ran by him, you know, some of the things that worked

01:14and some of the things that maybe didn't work so well.

01:16And he was stressing to me that, you know,

01:18this is exactly what they want in this period of early access or a beta version of Alexa.

01:23They want to hear feedback, that they've gotten a ton of great feedback,

01:27but also there's some negative feedback.

01:29I also asked him about the reporting that OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT,

01:34will at some point create their own device.

01:37And he basically said, we want great products out there.

01:40We trust that we're building something differentiated.

01:43So in sort of a key Amazonian fashion,

01:47which is we don't pay too much attention to competitors.

01:50He kind of said like, I wish them well.