Sean Captain contributed to this article
Amazon is making a serious push to be your personal AI assistant across every device you use. At CES 2026, the company announced Alexa.com, bringing its AI assistant directly to web browsers.
Alexa.com is rolling out to all Alexa+ Early Access customers. One of them, my colleague Sean Captain, did a quick comparison to ChatGPT and found mixed but mostly positive results. (See below for more info.) The web version works just like the voice and mobile versions, letting you get answers, manage your smart home, create shopping lists, plan meals, and handle other tasks right from your browser. It can also generate images.
Amazon's everywhere strategy
With Alexa.com in your browser, Alexa devices in your home, and the redesigned app on your phone, Amazon is trying to give a consistent Alexa experience across most contexts. It also has Bee, an AI wearable and assistant, which it acquired last year, but it runs a different AI system entirely.
Amazon’s smart home and devices ecosystem is among the most prominent out there, so if you already use Echo speakers, Fire TV, Kindle, and shop on Amazon a lot, you might get some pretty good mileage out of this.
Read more: Amazon Fire TV Gets Smarter with Alexa+ AI Upgrade
Google has Gemini across Android phones, Chromebooks, and its home products. Apple has Siri on iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watch, and HomePods. Amazon has been stuck in the home with its Echo devices for years. These announcements show the company is finally serious about competing on a wider stage.
How well does Alexa.com work?
The bigger question is whether Alexa's conversational AI is actually good enough for this vision of an everywhere assistant. Alexa+ launched nine months ago, and reviews have been mixed. Consumer Reports praised the AI but said the app holds it back. Amazon has redesigned the app now.
Sean found some similarities to the benchmark AI, ChatGPT, but also some key limitations. He started with a simple trivia question: "Tell me about philip of macedon." Both chatbots produced detailed, well-organized summaries about Alexander the Great's father, citing a good selection of sources. He then gave each a classic journalistic task: to summarize the transcript of an interview. Again, both performed admirably.
The two bots produced differently styled but equally valid images in response to the prompt, "Create a realistic cartoon image of a woman sitting in a cafe working at her laptop." Alexa created a wide (16:9) image by default and could not be persuaded to redo it as a square. ChatGPT created a square image and got close, but not all the way to 16:9 when asked to redo it.
The differences showed up in the way consumer assistance was provided. Both bots delivered handy recommendations to the prompt, "I'm looking for electric radiators." ChatGPT provided links to various online retailers for each product it listed – such as Walmart, Target, Wayfair, Temu, and eBay – but not Amazon (despite saying that it could do that). For its part, Alexa only recommended products on Amazon and included summarized listings and direct links to the product pages. When asked about this, it confirmed that it can only search Amazon. You can also place that Amazon order directly from the prompt line, without leaving Alexa.com.
Read more: ChatGPT’s Image Generator Got Faster but Still Gets Things Wrong
Both bots also provided nice, detailed tips based on the prompt, "I'm planning a trip to istanbul." But when asked to find flights, Alexa could only provide general information and suggestions for where to look for specific offers, such as Google Flights. ChatGPT, however, could pull up specific, real-time flight offers through the Expedia app, one of dozens of ChatGPT apps recently introduced.
Alexa.com seems to have the basic capabilities of other bots, but its newness and its Amazon-focused business model seem to limit it when it comes to consumer service.
[Image credits: Sean Captain/Techlicious via Alexa.com and ChatGPT, laptop image via Amazon]
