A peek behind Amazon's new Alexa

Alexa plus 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.

00:06NYCFC2 is playing Toronto FC2 on Wednesday, July 16th.

00:10I think it's actually pronounced NYCFC, 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.