The company’s Alexa Tablets, announced Thursday (Oct. 8), comes with Amazon’s Alexa+ as well as access to a range of apps via the Google Play Store.
“Alexa+ is built into the core of every tablet, delivering help that works with whatever you’re doing, when you need it,” Amazon said in its announcement.
“Say ‘Alexa’ or tap the ‘Ask Alexa’ button, and Alexa appears instantly—answering questions, suggesting next steps, controlling your smart home, and more—in a new experience we customized for tablets, without leaving what you’re doing or opening an app. Alexa also provides the same highly personalized experience you would expect—your content, your smart home, your recommendations, your preferences—from the moment you sign in.”
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The tablets include an “On-Screen Intelligence” feature that lets users ask Alexa to look at their screen in real time. For example, a user can ask “Alexa, which of these hikes is best for me?” while browsing trails and the chatbot will read the page, glean key details and help make a plan based on its knowledge of the user.
Writing about the evolution of Alexa earlier this year, PYMNTS noted that when Amazon debuted the technology in 2014, the idea behind it was simple.
“People would talk to machines the way they talk to each other,” the report said. “The reality played out differently, but advances in AI capabilities are increasingly helping voice-based interfaces intersect with the upper range of user expectations.”
The report also cited an analysis by PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, who said voice is set to become the connective tissue linking consumers and agentic commerce systems.
“Voice will finally pull agentic commerce onto the mobile phone by turning complex, desktop-only ‘go do this for me’ prompts into natural, spoken conversations that consumers can have anywhere,” Webster wrote, describing voice not as an incremental feature but as a way to unlock execution at scale.
During an earnings call in April, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that customers using Alexa+ are interacting with the voice assistant twice as much, making purchases on devices three times more, streaming music 25% more and using smart home functions 50% more.
PYMNTS Intelligence research in the April 2026 Payments Innovation Tracker® Series, a collaboration with Paymentology, showed that nearly half of all consumers surveyed were at least somewhat interested in artificial intelligence agents doing their grocery shopping or planning their meals for them, managing their subscriptions or buying gifts.
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