The high stakes for AI Alexa

Amazon has been trying to make virtual assistants happen for more than a decade. Alexa is, by many definitions, wildly successful, but it has so far failed to become the kind of omnipresent, omnipotent helper the company imagines. (It has also, by all accounts, failed to become a compelling business for Amazon.) This week, though, Amazon launched the most ambitious version of Alexa yet, with new technology underneath and some big new ideas about how you might interact with AI.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk a lot about what’s next for Alexa. David Imel — who you might know as the co-host of the Waveform podcast — joins the show to help us figure out what to make of Alexa Plus, and the whole idea that large language models can make virtual assistants both more useful and more accessible. Amazon’s description of Alexa Plus makes a lot of sense, and sounds pretty compelling, but we have reservations both about the user experience and about Amazon’s ability to actually pull this off.

After that, we dive into a busy week of gadget news, beginning with one of the more unusual camera launches we’ve seen in a while. We also talk about the iPhone 16E, and the new devices from Framework. (More to come next week on that one.)

Finally, in the lightning round, we talk about YouTube’s ascent as a podcast platform, Instagram and TikTok and YouTube all continuing to try and become each other, what’s new with DOGE, the Apple US investment plan, Brendan Carr’s ongoing assault on free speech, and the latest from Beeper.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, first on Alexa:

And in other gadget news:

And in the lightning round: