Alexa+ is now available for a bunch of Bose products, including some just-announced devices like the Lifestyle Ultra Speaker and Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar. This marks the first time the upgraded smart assistant has been officially integrated into something other than an Amazon-made device.
The Lifestyle Ultra line doesn’t launch until May 15, but preorders are open right now. Otherwise, Alexa+ is currently available on Bose products like the Smart Ultra Soundbar, the Home Speaker and the Portable Smart Speaker, among others.
For the uninitiated, Alexa+ is Amazon’s latest smart assistant and represents a fairly substantial upgrade from the old version. It’s better at understanding conversational language and can theoretically be used to do stuff like make restaurant reservations.
As for this Bose integration, Amazon says that the assistant can be used to find songs based on context. It gives an example of a user asking the bot to “play that song from that movie where the guy holds up the boombox outside his girlfriend’s house.” To be annoyingly specific, Lloyd and Diane were actually broken up during that 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 boring blizzard.
