Amazon showed off its new artificial intelligence-powered version of its Alexa voice assistant at an event on Tuesday.

Known as Alexa+, the new multi-modal version of the assistant is capable of doing tasks such as booking reservations, ordering concert tickets, texting babysitters, remembering smart home devices and more. "The rearchitecture of all of Alexa has happened," Amazon Senior Vice President of Devices and Services Panos Panay said at an event in New York. "We're pumped about it."

Alexa+ will cost $19.99 per month, but it will be free if you are a Prime member, Panay added. Early access will begin in March and it will work on nearly every Alexa device the company has shipped, Panay explained.

"The new Alexa knows almost every instrument in your life: schedule, smart home, devices, entertainment, apps you use," Panay added, while showing off the service on an Echo Show and Echo speakers. "And brings them together."

Panay also showed off integration with Ring smart home cameras, which is also owned by Amazon.

The new Alexa+ assistant, which can be accessed via Alexa.com or a new phone app, is smarter, more conversational and personalized (while also integrating humor) than the previous version and can "get things done," Panay explained during a live demo of the service.

The new service integrates with "tens of thousands" of other partners, including Ticketmaster, Uber, OpenTable, Zoom and more.

It also has a new user interface, a new voice and comes with a smart home widget. The ability to integrate handwritten and text-based documents and PDFs has also been added, the company added.

Alexa+ uses Amazon Bedrock for large language model access, including Anthropic's and Amazon Nova models. However, the service is model-agnostic, Daniel Rausch, VP of Alexa and Echo, explained.

Mara Segal, director of Alexa, showed off two new features of Alexa+ aimed at kids: Explore and Stories with Alexa. Explore answers questions and asks riddles, while Stories with Alexa can create stories for children.

A re-engineered version of Alexa may be financially beneficial to the company, as 20% more people used Alexa in 2024 than they did in 2023, Panos explained, adding that Alexa has "millions" of new customers every month.

Separately at the event, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that "tens of millions" of people were using Amazon's Rufus AI shopping assistant every month and that the company had just over 1,000 generative AI applications already built or in the process of building.