Amazon just gave Alexa its biggest upgrade since debut - and you'll want an Echo Show for it - Related to come, echo, upgrade, alexa, since

Amazon just gave Alexa its biggest upgrade since debut - and you'll want an Echo Show for it

Amazon's early-year Devices and Services event took place just days ago, and. The enterprise made it clear that AI will continue to be at the center of its hardware universe. Driving the buzzword of the century is Alexa, arguably the most popular virtual assistant in the world. SVP of Devices and Services Panos Panay suggested that millions of new clients use it every day during the event.

Also: Everything you need to know about Alexa+, Amazon's new generative AI assistant.

And that's likely true: Alexa is at the core of Amazon's most prominent hardware products. Including Echo speakers and Fire TVs. Today, the organization showcased what's next for its virtual assistant, now named Alexa+, as it looks to compete with the likes of Google. OpenAI, and others. The new Alexa will be "something that understands you, that can actually take action," Panay teased, and it will work with tens of thousands of services from Amazon partners.

Here's a rundown of the best new aspects coming with Alexa+ and how much it will cost.

Powered by LLMs. Alexa+ can now process visual information via your device's cameras to understand and answer questions. In one instance, Alexa was asked to describe the crowd's excitement and enthusiasm at the event by leveraging the Echo Show 15's front-facing camera. While its responses were two to three sentences long, they were descriptive and dictated in a fairly approachable tone.

The agentic capabilities of Alexa+ extend to browsing, with the ability to navigate the internet and. Complete tasks for you on Amazon-partnered websites. For example, Alexa was asked to book a professional repairman for a damaged appliance. It then searched for a nearby repair service and booked an appointment via Thumbtack.

Also: Amazon's new Alexa+ companion devices coming this fall.

In another demo, a presenter worked with Alexa to build out a shopping list. Suggesting items to add or remove throughout the conversation. Surprisingly, the feature supported shopping partners beyond Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh.

As Alexa responds. A flowing blue animation appears on the bottom of the device screen. This new change reflects Amazon's more expressive UI.

Besides responding more naturally, with sprinkles of humor, another big unveiling showed how Alexa can now fulfill tasks throughout your daily apps and services. Including your calendar and emails. It can book a dinner for you and send invitations for that to your closest contacts, too. We've seen similar agentic capabilities with Google's Gemini.

In a demo, the virtual assistant was asked to recommend local pizzerias. To which it pulled top-rated storefronts via Yelp. Another example included asking Alexa to remember things, such as "Mary likes Greek and Indian food and is vegetarian but doesn't like peanut butter." It did just that without a question.

Amazon also unveiled a series of new widgets alongside its refreshed Echo Show home screen, including ones that surface recipes, recent apps, weather. Shopping lists, and connected smart home devices.

Also: 5 Amazon Alexa privacy settings you should change right away.

Moving to another aspect, the adaptive display leverages the larger screen real estate to display relevant information depending on whether you're far away from the device or closer to it. For example, the Echo Show will display photos and personalized content from afar and switch to a more detailed layout when you approach it.

For a music demo. Panay asked Alexa, "What's the song Bradley Cooper sings... it's like in a duet?" to which it answered, "Shallow with Lady Gaga from the movie *A Star Is Born*." More impressively, you can now dictate where music is playing from if you have multiple Alexa-enabled speakers in your house.

Also: The best Alexa devices of 2025: Expert tested and recommended.

For example. You can ask Alexa to play music on the left or right, with the assumption that speakers are mounted in designated areas. We'll have to see exactly how reliable this is in real-world tests. And for Amazon's last trick, Panay asked Alexa to skip to the scene in the movie when "Shallow" is sung, and. It did -- on the second try.

Alexa now supports AI-powered video search, allowing it to process recordings by Ring cameras to answer questions. In a live demo, Panay asked the assistant whether anyone had taken out the dog yesterday or the day before, to which it sifted through past video libraries to determine the answer.

"You can now share just about anything with Alexa," stated Mara Segal. Director of Alexa. That includes dense legal documents, handwritten notes, school schedules, PDFs, and more, from which the assistant can process the content and answer related questions.

Also: How I feed my files to a local AI for enhanced, more relevant responses.

In relation to this, in another example, a school schedule was uploaded, and. Alexa was asked to add dates for soccer practices to the calendar and suggest snacks that could be brought to them.

Amazon's focus on kids-centric services extends to Alexa+, which now includes the Explore and Stories aspects. In a demo, the assistant was asked to create a story about funny animals. It followed up with a story about "Benny the Bearded Dragon," accompanied by a series of AI-generated artwork.

The upgraded Alexa service will cost $ a month or be free if you're an Amazon Prime member. It will officially roll out over the next few weeks and "subsequently in waves in the coming months," .

What Amazon Echo devices will support Alexa+?

Amazon says that Alexa+ will be available on all Echo devices, including the Show 8, 10, 15, and 21, with the exception of certain older generation Echo devices like Echo Dot 1st Gen, Echo 1st Gen, Echo Plus 1st Gen, Echo Tap, Echo Show 1st Gen, Echo Show 2nd Gen. And Echo Spot 1st Gen, where you can continue to use the original Alexa.

Also: Not all Echo devices will get Alexa+ initially - see if yours made the list.

, "You'll also be able to try Alexa+ on your web browser, the Alexa app, compatible Fire TVs and Fire tablets. This experience is not currently supported on Alexa Built-in devices and Amazon Astro, however we look forward to expanding Alexa+ to additional devices in the future."

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Where do startups come from? Ideas and entrepreneurs, of course

At TNW, we are all about supporting and elevating startups and entrepreneurs who are doing epic stuff with tech. When Red Bull reached out to talk about their innovation competition, my first thought was what on Earth do we have in common with an energy drink corporation that has people jumping off cliffs and surfing really large waves?

Apart from fuelling — in different ways — founders and. Developers across the world, of course. (Although, I guess, building a organization could be considered an extreme sport.).

Turns out, when it comes to supporting young minds that could change the world with their ideas — quite a lot.

Red Bull Basement is the beverage giant’s recurring innovation competition that, in the business’s words, “empowers the next generation of innovators to develop and launch outstanding ideas and. Disrupt today’s status quo.” The 2024 edition took place across 39 countries, and received over 110,000 submissions.

The local winners were all flown out to Tokyo for a global final across three days over the past week. They got to take part in workshops on business modelling, utilising AI as a founder, creating a successful pitch, forming strategic partnerships, brand development, media relations, etc.

The top 10 got to pitch their ideas to the panel of global judges — and. An auditorium of a few hundred people — on the 45th floor, in front of a backdrop of Tokyo lit up at night. The prize for the global winner was an all-expenses-paid three-week trip to San Francisco to be mentored by Silicon Valley-based Plug and Play VC.

Part of the appeal for us as a media organisation was of course access to the judges, including Head of Microsoft for Startups Hans Yang, Plug and Play early-stage investor Letizia Royo-Villanova, and digital economy business mentor Jun Yuh, to pick their brains on how they identify winning startups and exceptional founders (and I did. All of which will follow in another article).

However, what really moved me was the ingenuity, drive, and enthusiasm of the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Ideas included a bone conduction device to help people with Parkinson’s walk more securely built by Cambridge student Jonathan Fisher, whose father suffers from the disease. “I figured, if something is key enough, you should try, even if the odds are against you. Because you never know what will happen,” Fisher told TNW.

Another device built by Stanford students in the US wants to give the visually impaired their sight back. There were also water-saving AI-supported gadgets from Greece and Egypt, wild-fire warning systems from South Africa, AI tools to help students connect with mentors and scholarship opportunities from Ireland and Spain or democratise access to high-level sports coaching from Belgium.

Other innovations included early illness detection from Kosovo, brain fitness tracking from the Czech Republic. And an athlete mental training app from Germany — just to name a few.

The winner of the global final was Soi Gamayon from the Philippines with his AgriConnect startup. The AI-powered app, inspired by watching his uncle’s struggle farming rice, allows farmers to monitor their crops, build resilience. And increase their yield.

“My purpose is really to build something bigger than myself,” noted Gamayon. “I’m doing this for Filipino farmers. This wasn’t just about competing or winning. It’s about sharing moments and memories with people who are like-minded. I share this with all the other teams who are here.”.

Dutch finalist looking for the ‘positive side of tech’.

The Dutch finalist, fresh out of graduate studies in Strategic Management at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Was Bram van Peursem, with an AI-powered app called Hubster. He made it all the way to the top 10.

Based on his own experience of losing hours of precious time to mindless social media scrolling while managing his own schedule as a student, van Peursem designed Hubster to help people transform their phone usage from a time sink into motivation to act on the things they hope to achieve in life.

Hubster, still under development. Will let you enter the interests and ambitions that are currently most significant to you. Van Peursem gives the examples of running a marathon, understanding more about tech stocks, and learning German.

As you embark on a scrolling session that will surely end half an hour later with the yucky feeling of “but I was only going to check…” the app will instead prompt you with notifications such as “It’s currently great weather for a 5k recovery run,” “AMD just revealed a chip modification, read more about it here” and. Link to an article, or “Nutzen sie ihre zeit so optimal?” with your language learning app of choice.

“It is really focused on making tech positive,” van Peursem told TNW. “Because I think we often forget that our phone is a tool which has all the information in the world, very accessible in your pocket. But nobody uses it like that.”.

The desire to build something has been there from the start. “I have always wanted to be a founder,” van Peursem, both of whose parents are entrepreneurs, says. “I’ve always had these ideas but I never really acted on them. And that was also the thing I was most scared about — I want to be an entrepreneur, but. What if I never act on it? So I’m really grateful to Red Bull and Microsoft for this opportunity [to make the idea concrete].

Personally, I always feel honoured to tell the stories of people who have ideas and. Work hard to bring them to reality, striving to impact the world in positive ways. Us journalists only observe and write about it — entrepreneurs are the ones actually building stuff. Mostly just fuelled by pure drive and passion, but sometimes — like when running a startup bootcamp marathon — by copious amounts of caffeine.

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Gemini 2.0 is now available to everyone

In December, we kicked off the agentic era by releasing an experimental version of Gemini Flash — our highly efficient workhorse model for developers with low latency and. Enhanced performance. Earlier this year, we updated Flash Thinking Experimental in Google AI Studio, which improved its performance by combining Flash’s speed with the ability to reason through more complex problems.

And last week, we made an updated Flash available to all customers of the Gemini app on desktop and mobile, helping everyone discover new ways to create. Interact and collaborate with Gemini.

Today, we’re making the updated Gemini Flash generally available via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI. Developers can now build production applications with Flash.

We’re also releasing an experimental version of Gemini Pro, our best model yet for coding performance and. Complex prompts. It is available in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI, and in the Gemini app for Gemini Advanced individuals.

We’re releasing a new model, Gemini Flash-Lite, our most cost-efficient model yet, in public preview in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI.

Finally. Flash Thinking Experimental will be available to Gemini app individuals in the model dropdown on desktop and mobile.

All of these models will feature multimodal input with text output on release, with more modalities ready for general availability in the coming months. More information, including specifics about pricing, can be found in the Google for Developers blog. Looking ahead, we’re working on more updates and improved capabilities for the Gemini family of models.

Flash: a new modification for general availability.

First introduced at I/O 2024, the Flash series of models is popular with developers as a powerful workhorse model, optimal for high-volume. High-frequency tasks at scale and highly capable of multimodal reasoning across vast amounts of information with a context window of 1 million tokens. We’ve been thrilled to see its reception by the developer community.

Flash is now generally available to more people across our AI products, alongside improved performance in key benchmarks, with image generation and. Text-to-speech coming soon.

Try Gemini Flash in the Gemini app or the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI. Pricing details can be found in the Google for Developers blog.

Pro Experimental: our best model yet for coding performance and complex prompts.

As we’ve continued to share early, experimental versions of Gemini like Gemini-Exp-1206, we’ve gotten excellent feedback from developers about its strengths and. Best use cases, like coding.

Today, we’re releasing an experimental version of Gemini Pro that responds to that feedback. It has the strongest coding performance and ability to handle complex prompts, with superior understanding and. Reasoning of world knowledge, than any model we’ve released so far. It comes with our largest context window at 2 million tokens, which enables it to comprehensively analyze and understand vast amounts of information, as well as the ability to call tools like Google Search and code execution.

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