Amazon brings Alexa+ to the UK | TechCrunch

Last day to exhibit your breakthrough to 10,000+ tech leaders at Disrupt is on Oct 2. Book Exhibit Table Now. Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW. Amazon is bringing its new AI-powered conversational assistant, Alexa+, to the U.K., the first country to get the AI assistant outside of North America. The company is currently letting users in the U.K. try out Alexa+ for free via an early access program. Users who buy the new Amazon Echo will receive an invite for the early access program, and the company says it plans to enable Alexa+ for “hundreds of thousands” of customers in the coming weeks. Once the early access program ends, Prime subscribers will get to use Alexa+ for free, and non-Prime users will need to pay £19.99 per month. The company hasn’t specified when the early access program ends. Alexa+ works with Amazon’s new Echo devices, Fire TV, and the Alexa app, and can carry conversational context from one device to another. The company plans to extend support for Alexa+ to browsers as well. Amazon said it has customized Alexa+ for U.K. customers, and the assistant can understand local context as well as commonly used