Amazon upgrades Alexa Plus with new Fire TV Hub

Amazon has announced its biggest Alexa Plus update yet, adding a dedicated hub on Fire TV devices along with substantial improvements to how the AI assistant reasons through requests. 

The rollout arrives alongside a refresh of Amazon's Fire TV Stick lineup, though most of the new capabilities won't be available immediately.

In its latest version, Alexa Plus, the assistant will consider cultural references, award nominations, and news items when answering questions, while considering the user’s subscription history and watch history for making recommendations. 

Besides this, Amazon plans to revamp the user interface of the assistant to enable following up on previous questions and resuming from a previous conversation. 

Some examples of queries provided by Amazon are sorting the Marvel films based on their release timeline and finding Emmy-nominated programmes that got ignored.

The new Alexa Plus hub on Fire TV is built specifically around content discovery, offering personalised prompt suggestions alongside improved recommendations. 

Conversations started through the hub will sync across Amazon's device ecosystem, including the Alexa smartphone app and compatible Echo speakers, so a query started on one device can continue on another.

Perhaps the most functional addition is Alexa Plus support within the Fire TV mobile app, letting users search by text or voice away from the TV itself. 

The integration allows users to share a photo, even a meme, that reminds them of a movie or show and ask the assistant to identify it, or share an online article containing film recommendations and have Alexa Plus compile everything mentioned into a watchlist. 

It will be possible to add titles to the watchlist immediately, and, through the streaming services icon, viewers can immediately start viewing titles from their phone, which will show up in the viewer's "Continue Watching" row.

The availability is delayed and, in some cases, far away from being immediate. The new Fire TV hub will be available starting November for the US customers for the Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2nd Gen), Fire TV Cube, Amazon Ember TVs, and TVs that incorporate Fire TV functionality from such brands as TCL and Hisense.

The current Fire TV Stick 4K won't receive the update un

til next year.