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After months of waiting, Amazon has at last announced the arrival of Alexa+ in the UK. Starting from 18 March, the AI-enhanced, all-improved voice assistant is coming to new devices and some existing smart speakers – and if you already pay for Prime, you won’t have to pay extra to get it.
Alexa+, which launched last autumn alongside a range of new Alexa+-enabled smart speakers, promises a more natural-sounding voice assistant that can understand what you say more readily and is capable of carrying out more conversational interactions. Until now, however, the AI voice assistant has only been available to customers in the US, Canada and Mexico.
Now that Amazon has completed localisation work, Alexa is fully equipped to take on the UK, and you’ll be able to try the service out from 18 March if you sign up for Amazon’s Early Access programme or you buy a new Alexa+ device.
Which devices does Alexa+ work on?
Alexa+ works, of course, with any of the devices announced in October 2025 – that’s the Echo Show 8 (2025) and Echo Show 11, the Echo Dot Max and Echo Studio.
But it’s not limited to just new devices with the Alexa+ label on the box. It will also run on 3rd generation Echo speakers and later, 2nd generation Echo Dots and later and 3rd generation Echo Show devices and onwards.
It won’t work with Amazon Tap devices or older Fire TVs and tablets, but most devices bought in recent years should work just fine. You can find out what does and does not work with Alexa+ on the Amazon support website.
Even if you don’t own any compatible devices, you’ll be able to try out the new service in a couple of weeks via the browser or the Alexa app on your phone.
What can Alexa+ do?
But why would you want to? If standard Alexa does what you need it to, why shift to the new version? We’ll only find out in time if Alexa+ is qualitatively better than the voice assistant it supplants, but in terms of the features on offer – aside from the ability to respond with British vernacular vocabulary such as “mate” and “gander”, and recognise such UK brand icons as pickled onion Monster Munch – Alexa+ should be able to do more when asked without being as proscriptive about how you ask it.
During a behind-closed-doors demonstration session before the launch, Amazon representatives asked Alexa+ for Indian restaurant recommendations, which the AI was then able to proceed and book after a quick conversation. It did this via OpenTable.
Other demonstrations were more prosaic. We were shown Alexa building recipe recommendations based on a partial list of ingredients, playing songs based on loose descriptions or a description of your mood, and being able to identify and play back the weirdly specific “man climbing on bins” footage captured on a Ring security camera.
Alexa+ also lets you set up complex routines with a simple vocal “prompt”, and even process documents and emails forwarded to it – one example of the latter was adding all the dates in a school email to your calendar.
Impressive stuff. But, of course, all these demonstrations were scripted and designed to show off the best of Alexa+; we won’t know how well it truly works in the UK until we’ve lived with it for a while – I’d be happy for it to just be able to play BBC radio stations when I ask instead saying “okay” and then going silent. I’m not sure I really want it to book restaurants for me or order takeaway. But time will tell, and you can give it a try for yourself from today and make your own decision.
