Welcome to . AI moves fast. We help you keep up. Much has unfolded in AI Land since we last spoke. Amazon has officially announced Alexa+, OpenAI has made a feature cheaper that used to cost $200/month, Anthropic unveiled and released Claude 3.7, and Perplexity has previewed its new AI-driven Comet browser for agentic search.

At a media event that Amazon chose not to stream, former Microsoft Surface guy turned Amazon Alexa champion Panos Panay revealed Alexa+, the Amazon Echo-based voice assistant for the large language model era.

If you’ve ever used OpenAI’s ChatGPT Advanced Voice mode, you’re already familiar with the caliber of Alexa+ AI. Amazon’s modernized version of Alexa promises personality and contextual awareness including memory of previous conversations.

Bloomberg’s Matt Day and Mark Gurman were in attendance:

A demo video showed Alexa booking concert tickets, restaurant reservations and texting a babysitter. “She’s useful,” Panay repeated, before conducting what he said was a live conversation with the updated software. During the presentation, he demonstrated a flowing ongoing conversation — a departure from the stilted, single-question interactions Alexa users are familiar with.

Amazon is powering Alexa+ with Amazon Nova and Anthropic models. Alexa+ launches in March for $19.99/month or free for Amazon Prime subscribers. Access is provided through Echo speakers as well as the new alexa.com. More details in Amazon’s newly posted blog entry here.

Sign up for early access to Alexa+ here. Amazon is promising free early access to customers who own or purchase an Echo Show 21, 15, 10, or 8. Alexa+ also works with Fire TV and Fire tablets.

Meanwhile, Apple’s Siri voice assistant can only punt requests off to ChatGPT for a somewhat comparable experience.

Speaking of Anthropic, the company launched its promised update to Claude in the form of Claude 3.7 Sonnet.

Just as Anthropic teased, Claude 3.7 Sonnet combines reasoning and fast responses into a single model — something OpenAI wants to bring to ChatGPT with GPT-5 later this year. Anthropic is also leaning into Claude’s coding prowess with a new command line tool for agentic coding called Claude Code:

Claude 3.7 Sonnet can produce near-instant responses or extended, step-by-step thinking that is made visible to the user. API users also have fine-grained control over how long the model can think for.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet shows particularly strong improvements in coding and front-end web development. Along with the model, we’re also introducing a command line tool for agentic coding, Claude Code. Claude Code is available as a limited research preview, and enables developers to delegate substantial engineering tasks to Claude directly from their terminal.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code are live now.

And speaking of OpenAI’s ChatGPT Advanced Voice mode, the company has found a way to bring the conversational voice assistant to more users while using fewer resources, thanks to the smaller GPT-4o mini model.

Starting today, we’re rolling out a version of Advanced Voice powered by GPT-4o mini to give all ChatGPT free users a chance to preview it daily across platforms. The natural conversation pace and tone are similar to the GPT-4o version while being more cost effective to serve.

OpenAI continues to offer a more advanced version of Advanced Voice for $20/month for Plus subscribers or $200/month for Pro customers.

Plus users will continue to have access to Advanced Voice powered by 4o with the existing daily rate limit, which is more than 5x the free limit, as well as access to video and screensharing in Advanced Voice. And Pro users will continue to have unlimited access to Advanced Voice and higher limits for video and screensharing.

If you’ve never tried Advanced Voice, give it a try in the ChatGPT app on iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

The most significant artificial intelligence innovation from OpenAI this year is ChatGPT Deep Research. Previously only available for $200/month, Deep Research is now available for Plus, Team, Edu, and Enterprise customers for the first time.

Pro customers still have the best experience with up to 120 deep research queries per month, compared to just 10 for Plus users. However, access to the same agentic technology at a tenth of the price is compelling.

This also marks the first agent tool from OpenAI to reach Plus customers. OpenAI’s Operator tool for achieving tasks through an agent-driven browser is still only available for Pro customers.

Speaking of agentic technology, Perplexity has teased its upcoming agent-driven browser called Comet. Want to know more? You’ll have to wait, or you can join the waitlist here. Perplexity is also hiring engineers to help build Comet, suggesting we won’t see the “agentic search” browser any time soon.

Separately, The Browser Company behind Arc has steadily continued building Dia, another browser that aims to integrate AI seamlessly into web browsing. Pivoting from an AI-featured browser to an AI-first browser is a choice. If all else fails, The Browser Company could position itself as the non-monopolistic buyer of Chrome if Google is forced by the DOJ to sell.

More on the latest in AI developments in the next edition of — only on 9to5Mac! Read the previous issue here.

Featured image via our colleague Max Weinbach

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