By Derek Rose

A ChatGPT-style audio chatbot is coming to a brand of smart speakers used in millions of Australian homes – and its makers promise it’s been painstakingly trained to understand our culture.

Amazon on Thursday began its local rollout of Alexa+, a next-generation, AI-powered personal assistant that uses the same large language model technology as ChatGPT and Claude to make conversations natural and fluid, not robotic and stilted.

In a live demo in Sydney on Wednesday, the chatbot was able to draft a banter-filled email to change a luncheon date, remember personal information about its users, and correctly deduce the name of Harry Styles’ hit song Watermelon Sugar from a vague reference about strawberries.

Blake Nussy, a Brisbane-born senior technical product manager at Amazon Alexa now based in Seattle, said that while the training of large language models sometimes resulted in them acting and reasoning like an American, this definitely wouldn’t be the case for Alexa+.

“We’ve worked very hard between our engineers, our scientists, and also the local team here in Sydney, to deliver an authentic Australian experience for our customers here,” he said.

“We think Alexa+ acts and thinks like an Australian, and this took a lot of work, many techniques went into this.”

Things that were stereotypically Australian became a metric in the chatbot’s training, Mr Nussey said, adding that unlike some of his American colleagues, Alexa+ understands important details like the difference between a latte and a flat white.

Amazon’s Alexa country manager Kate Gooden said the chatbot was “truly and authentically Australian”.

“So Australian culture is all about slang and dry humour and all of those funny little habits that we have,” Ms Gooden said.

“The things that make Australians unique, she’s got it covered, especially putting an O on the end of everything.”

The chatbot will be available on all Alexa devices purchased from Thursday.

Owners of existing Amazon Echo devices are also able to accept an invitation to upgrade to Alexa+, although the rollout for them will be gradual, with the next-generation chatbot available at launch to just tens of thousands of users.

Surveys indicate that more than one in three Australian households own some kind of smart speaker, with Alexa the second-most popular, behind Google Nest.

Australians interacted with the current version of Alexa over 2 billion times in 2025, asking it 77 million general knowledge questions.

Amazon Australia said that Alexa+ would be free to all users in the initial launch period, and free to Amazon Prime subscribers thereafter, with others charged a monthly fee.