Trevor Wood

Australia, we're excited that Australians are going to be able to check out Alexa Plus in 2026.

So Aussies are going to be able to try this new more conversational Alexa.

Really works back and forth, not like talking to a machine, but like a natural conversation.

And yeah, we're excited for them to start trying it.

Right, and so when we launched here in Britain, we knew that just launching something that was a copy paste from the U.S.

wouldn't work, it wouldn't feel locally authentic, and Aussies, too, have unique way of communicating, so Alexa might be able to tell you, look, you're feeling not well, chuck a sickie tomorrow.

People will understand that it feels like a locally authentic communication, and getting that right takes a little longer, and we want it to be the right experience for customers.

We're saying coming soon today.

We're saying coming soon but confirming it's in 2026.

The LLM, we're trying to build a multicultural LLM, right?

So I think it should understand those idioms still, but I think it's how Alexa speaks back to you, right?

Alexa speaks back to you like you're talking to an Australian assistant.

So how a really obscure British idiom is going to work in an Australian, I don't know, it might depend case by case, but what we really focused on is that it feels like the assistant is Australian.

I think people often do set up the local account because they want to use the local shipping.

In the UK and the other places where we've launched, Alexa Plus has been included with Prime.

So that's been kind of part of tying it to the account.

I'm not sure what the strategy is there in Australia at the moment.

That's how it works in the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, and details are going to come when we launch for customers in Australia in 2026.

We call it ambient intelligence.

I'll just give a small story from my family that shows why it's important.