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.
BMW announced in 2022 that Amazon Alexa would be the foundation of its next-generation voice assistant. This meant BMW wouldn’t just embed Alexa into its vehicles, but would use Amazon’s technology platform known as Alexa Custom Assistant to build its own custom version. That timeline was extended as Amazon worked on an automotive version of Alexa+, an overhauled voice assistant developed and powered by large language models that promises to deliver seamless and natural conversations, like talking to a human.
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.
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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 say music, navigation, and a home security system.
