Alexa+ is now available for a number of Bose products, including some just-announced devices like the Lifestyle Ultra speaker and Lifestyle Ultra soundbar. This is the first time the upgraded smart assistant has been officially integrated into something other than an Amazon-made device.
The Lifestyle Ultra range won’t launch until May 15, but pre-orders are open now. Otherwise, Alexa+ is currently available on Bose products like the Smart Ultra Soundbar, Home Speaker and Portable Smart Speaker, among others.
For the uninitiated, Alexa+ is Amazon’s latest smart assistant and represents a pretty substantial upgrade over the older version. It provides insight into conversational language and can theoretically be used to do things like make restaurant reservations.
As for that Bose integration, Amazon says the Assistant can be used to search for songs based on context. He gives the example of a user asking the robot to “play this song from this movie where the guy is holding the boombox in front of his girlfriend’s house.” To be extremely precise, Lloyd and Diane were actually separated during this scene, but whatever.
Amazon recently rolled out a handful of personality styles for Alexa+. I’m partial to the “sassy” option, which likes to warn me that a pending notification is “more boring than watching paint dry” before telling me about a dangerous and not at all annoying blizzard.