BMW is finally getting the next-generation Alexa voice assistant and it’s coming with a generative AI upgrade.
Amazon said Monday that the 2026 BMW iX3 will be equipped with Alexa+, the same generative AI tech that launched in millions of the e-commerce giant’s smart devices last year. This will be the first vehicle to come with Amazon’s next-generation voice assistant, the companies announced during the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
The launch is one part of Amazon’s effort to bring its LLM-powered voice and digital assistant to every device — whether handheld or in the driver’s seat — touched by consumers. Alexa+ is already in more than 600 million devices. And automotive is next on the list.
Bringing a custom version of Alexa+ into the BMW iX3 will be an important test for Amazon. Automakers have struggled for years to bring a voice assistant inside vehicles that can handle complex functions and requests that don’t end with the driver yelling in frustration. Efforts to develop natural language processing — a form of AI that lets computers understand and respond to human speech — have been in the works for more than a decade. And while progress has been made, these systems can still be easily stumped by humans.
BMW and Amazon’s Alexa+ partnership has been three years in the making.
Alexa+ was built using Amazon Bedrock, a service that lets AWS customers build apps using generative AI models from Amazon and other third-party partners. Customers, like BMW, can then customize the app with their proprietary data.
The end result, according to Amazon, is a voice assistant that can break down complex requests, reason through steps, and take actions across different services. For instance, Amazon says users can start a conversation with their Alexa+-enabled Echo speaker in the home and continue it in their BMW. Once in the car, the user can make requests through the Alexa+ assistant that might normally require opening up different apps, like music, navigation, and a home security system.
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