Wales` double Olympic taekwondo champion Jade Jones is switching sports and has taken up boxing. Read...

Wests Tigers host the Newcastle Knights in Round 1 of the 2025 NRL Premiership at Campbelltown Sports Stadium, Sydney. Read...

DirecTV is trying to break up the pay TV bundle this year with cheaper, genre-based packages, but one genre in particular is standing in the way. When you look at DirecTV Stream’s new MySports, MyEntertainment, and MyNews packages, they all have one thing in common: Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC are included whether you want them or not. Those mandatory cable news offerings are likely adding around $5 per month to each package based on reported per-subscriber carriage fees. Cable news is still a lucrative part of the pay TV ecosystem, so programmers may be unwilling to break them off from any TV package. But the result for DirecTV is a trio of bundles that still feel a bit bloated. Breaking down DirecTV’s new bundles DirecTV has a web page showing all its new bundles, with channel lists for each one, but here’s the gist: MyEntertainment ($35 per month) includes a broad mix of entertainment channels and cable news, but no local or sports channels. Disney+ and Hulu (with ads) are also included, and Max will be added soon at no extra charge. Notable channels include HGTV, History, Discovery, and Bravo. MyNews ($40 per month) has the big three major cable news networks along with local NBC and Fox stations, plus CNBC, CNBC World, Fox Business, CNN International, i24, and Newsmax. MySports ($70 per month) has local ABC, Fox, and NBC channels; plus, ESPN channels, Fox Sports channels, Turner channels (TNT, TBS, and TruTV), all four league-specific channels, and USA, along with cable news. ESPN+ is included as well. DirecTV is also selling a $35-per-month MiEspañol package and some optional add-ons, including a $10-per-month MyCinema package and a $13-per-month MySports Extra package with NFL RedZone. You’re allowed to mix and match different genre packs, but DirecTV also still offers larger channel bundles (which it now calls “Signature Packages”) that start at $90 per month. Because cable news is included in each of the three main packages listed above, you’re paying for them even if you never watch them. Fox News was seeking per-subscriber fees of around $3 per month as of 2023 according to Vanity Fair, while CNN’s carriage fees were $1.01 in 2020 according to Variety and have surely increased since then. Assuming similar fees for MSNBC, the three channels combined likely add around $5 per month to every pay TV package. Who are DirecTV’s new bundles for? It’s hard to imagine the ideal customer for DirecTV’s MyNews pack at $40 per month when its three most popular cable news channels are included in every other DirecTV English-language package. DirecTV’s MyEntertainment package, for instance, is $5 per month cheaper, yet it includes Disney+, Hulu, and Max (a $17-per-month value on their own); plus, a bunch of entertainment channels. Compared to MyNews, it’s only missing some less popular cable news channels, such as CNBC and Fox Business. While MyNews does include local Fox and NBC stations, it’s missing ABC and CBS, so it’s not a complete replacement for basic cable. You might be better off trying to get local channels with an antenna, signing up for a bigger bundle, or looking at other ways to get broadcast TV programming. DirecTV’s $70 per month MySports package is more compelling for sports fans, or at least it will be if DirecTV manages to add CBS stations. An option to add regional sports—the package’s other big missing piece—will come to select markets by the time baseball season starts. Still, it’d be a stronger package if sports fans didn’t have to pay a cable news tax as well. Everyone gets cable news DirecTV isn’t alone in having to carry cable news. In January, Comcast launched its own “Sports and News” package for $70 per month, the same price as DirecTV MySports. Though it omits sports programming from Warner Bros. Discovery (including TBS and TNT), it still includes Warner’s CNN along with Fox News and MSNBC. Meanwhile, Fubo is planning its own “Sports & Broadcast” bundle, with sources telling TheDesk’s Matthew Keys that it will cost between $50 and $60 per month. That package will reportedly include Fox News and Fox Business as well, because Fox is still requiring distributors to bundle its sports and news channels together, one source said. (Fox, for that matter, plans to include both sports and news in its forthcoming standalone streaming service.) Cable news still represents some of the most popular programming on cable, with MSNBC and Fox News routinely landing in the top 10 for total annual viewers, so some folks might appreciate that it’s part of every emerging skinny bundle. But for those who get their news elsewhere—be it via free streaming news channels or, dare I say it, print journalism—cable news is an unnecessary expense that stands in the way of more flexible and more affordable packaging. Sign up for Jared’s Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter for more streaming TV advice. Read...

A round-up of sports news from around the region, including rugby sevens, volleyball, weightlifting, football, cricket, and more. Read...

A second child is being treated after being struck by a car at Kendal Rugby Union Football Club. Read...

At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Fantastic 1440p gaming performance Radeon 9070 beats RTX 5070 performance; Radeon 9070 XT goes toe-to-toe with RTX 5070 Ti for $150 less 16GB of memory and 256-bit bus are built for 4K gaming and strenuous modern games Ray tracing performance is vastly improved AI accelerators enable FSR 4 upscaling Hypr-RX can turbocharge performance in 1,000s of games, with some visual compromises Cons FSR 4 was frustrating to use and inConsistently applied Much slower than RTX 5070 in AI text generation and Premiere Pro Occasional driver crashes; bad minimum frame times in Returnal No answer to Nvidia’s fantastic DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation feature Our Verdict The Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT offer much faster performance and more memory than Nvidia’s lackluster RTX 5070. Some software bugs mar the experience but overall, AMD’s 9070 graphics cards offer such a compelling mix of performance, value, and memory capacity that it’s worth accepting those quibbles. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Nvidia fumbled the ball with its $549 GeForce RTX 5070, and AMD’s new Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT are primed to seize advantage. The RTX 5070, hitting store shelves today, is a good 1440p graphics card but a stagnant generational sidegrade at best. Enter the $549 Radeon RX 9070 and $599 Radeon RX 9070 XT, launching tomorrow. Both cards are faster than the RTX 5070, with the 9070 XT going toe-to-toe with the $750 RTX 5070 Ti in many games, and each includes an ample 16GB of VRAM. The RTX 5070 is stuck with a disappointing 12GB. Even ray tracing, long an AMD weakness, improved dramatically! Bottom line? AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 series is the new 1440p gaming champion. If you opt for an RTX 5070 instead to get in on Nvidia’s DLSS 4 greatness, you’re making some major sacrifices in other areas. We’ve spent the past week testing the XFX Swift Triple Fan Gaming Edition and Asus TUF Gaming OC models of both of these cards. The Asus card is a heavily juiced custom model that sports an extra third power connector compared to other models – all the better to overclock with. Here are the key things you need to know before buying an AMD Radeon RX 9070 or 9070 XT. AMD Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT performance benchmarks Our benchmarks above include results from both the aforementioned XFX and Asus 9070 cards, albeit only at 1440p resolution. We skipped 4K testing to be able to include multiple Radeon 9070 models in these graphs. The Radeon RX 9070 cards kill it. Even though AMD’s new GPUs remain well behind Nvidia’s in complex ray tracing scenarios – performance is great in lighter RT loads, however – the $549 Radeon RX 9070 is flat-out faster than the $549 RTX 5070 when you average out the combined results from all games in our suite. All told, the Radeon 9070 runs about 8 percent faster than the RTX 5070 at 1440p. If you omit Black Myth Wukong – a very strenuous game with full, complex ray tracing, and an outlier where all Radeon GPUs noticeably falter – the Radeon RX 9070 is 11 percent faster than the RTX 5070. Wukong is the only game where the 9070 falls behind the 5070’s performance. But wait! While that’s impressive, the $599 Radeon RX 9070 XT blows both the RTX 5070 as well as the vanilla 9070 out of the water for just $50 more. AMD Across our suite, the Radeon 9070 XT runs 15 percent faster than the RTX 5070 on average, and 7 percent faster than the vanilla Radeon 9070. Excluding Black Myth Wukong, the 9070 XT runs 19 percent faster than the RTX 5070 – and it comes with 16GB of onboard memory, compared to the RTX 5070’s paltry 12GB. This is a major, major win for AMD. So major, in fact, that the Radeon RX 9070 XT punches above its weight class to challenge the $750 RTX 5070 Ti. The 5070 Ti is only 6 percent faster than the Radeon 9070, and that plummets to 3 percent if you omit Black Myth. Sweet holy moley. Did I mention that the RTX 5070 Ti costs $150 more than the Radeon RX 9070 XT? That means you get 3 to 6 percent more performance for a 25 percent jump in price – making the RTX 5070 Ti a terrible value proposition unless you really want DLSS 4 or better AI and creation chops. One tiny note: The 1 percent lows in Returnal are terribly low, and only on the 9070 GPUs. We’ve made AMD aware of the problem. AMD’s ray tracing doesn’t suck anymore Let’s bring back some of our earlier performance graphs, zeroing in on performance in ray traced games specifically. AMD focused heavily on improving ray tracing performance in RDNA 4, the next-generation graphics architecture powering the Radeon 9000-series. It shows in our benchmarks. Ray tracing performance was a major Achilles’ Heel for prior Radeon generations. No more – mostly. The Radeon 9070 series performs neck-and-neck with the RTX 5070 in games with moderate to heavy levels of ray tracing. In F1 24 and Returnal, both AMD GPUs actually run faster than the RTX 5070. That’s nothing I ever thought I’d be saying about these new Radeon GPUs. Adam Patrick Murray spent several days evaluating the 9070’s ray tracing performance in his small form-factor rig, playing RT games first on last generation’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX flagship, then the 9070. He’s still wrapping up final observations for a video – more on that soon – but in general, he reports large leaps forward in ray tracing performance on the 9070 XT. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows though. Once games start layering on multiple ray tracing effects and more strenuous RT features, such as path tracing, AMD’s GPUs fall behind Nvidia’s. The RTX 5070 is markedly faster than the Radeon 9070s in Black Myth Wukong as well as Cyberpunk 2077’s grueling RT Overdrive mode. If complex ray tracing matters to you, Nvidia’s cards may be a better option. 16GB of memory FTW So the Radeon RX 9070 series stomps the RTX 5070’s performance in all but the most strenuous ray traced games at 1440p. But here’s another consideration: The memory configuration of AMD’s offerings is more future-proof and built to run 4K as well. In fact, AMD marketed the Radeon 9070 series as “4K gaming at a 1440p price,” twisting a knife into Nvidia’s ribs. That’s because Nvidia outfitted the RTX 5070 with just 12GB of memory, paired with a puny 192-bit bus. (Think of a memory bus like a road; the bigger the bus, the more lanes in the road, letting more traffic move more swiftly.) A configuration like that limits the 5070’s potential to 1440p gaming alone; while many games can run at 4K on the RTX 5070, you shouldn’t buy that GPU with 4K gaming in mind. The Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT, meanwhile, both include an ample 16GB and a wider 256-bit bus. That means two critical things. One, while our testing focused on 1440p resolution, these cards – especially the 9070 XT – truly are built to handle 4K gaming, even if they’re tuned for prime 1440p performance. And two, the 16GB of memory makes it much more future-proof in an era where games gobble up ever-increasing amounts of memory, especially with ray tracing and frame generation active. The 12GB GeForce RTX 5070 already runs into issues at maximum settings in a handful of games, like the new Indiana Jones game, because of memory capacity issues. FSR 4 and Hypr-RX amplify performance AMD Nvidia placed the fate of the RTX 50-series in DLSS 4’s hands, and more specifically, its excellent new Multi Frame Generation feature. MFG uses AI to insert up to three generated frames between every traditional rendered frame. It doesn’t really improve performance as much as the raw frame rates may lead you to believe, but MFG delivers such a shocking improvement in visual smoothness and raw frame pacing that it’s truly transformative. AMD has no feature to match that directly – but it does have some performance-boosting software tricks up its sleeve. First is FSR 4. Prior FSR generations leveraged traditional GPU hardware to upscale images; FSR 4 instead leans on new, vastly improved AI accelerators built into the RDNA 4 architecture to handle upscaling instead, in DLSS-like fashion. We haven’t had much time to play with FSR 4 yet, but the image quality boost over FSR 3.1 is tangible. AMD says FSR 4 will be available in over 30 games at launch, with 75+ games expected to integrate the technology by the end of the year. The problem? We’ve had a terrible time reliably activating FSR 4 in games, needing to jump through hoops both in-game and in-driver, only for it to fall half the time. It’s an inauspicious start for FSR 4. My bud Adam Patrick Murray details his FSR 4 trials in the video above. Then there’s Hypr-RX, a great feature with a cringe name. AMD Hypr-RX is AMD’s name for a one-click feature that activates a bunch of separate Radeon features to supercharge performance in virtually all modern games. AMD supports driver-level FSR, Frame Generation (AMD Fluid Motion Frames), and anti-lag technologies, among others. That means developers don’t need to actively code in support for the features, like they do with DLSS and FSR – it just works. Flipping on Hypr-RX can send frame rates absolutely skyrocketing in almost any game you throw at it. It’s not as seamless as DLSS 4’s Multi-Frame Gen. Since these are driver-level tools, AMD’s FSR equivalent lacks developer integration, and image quality can sometimes take a hit – blurry interface elements and a general softness in image quality being the biggest offenses. You’ll also want to make sure the game is running at a solid frame rate before activating AMD’s frame gen (Hypr-RX’s upscaling usually takes care of that, especially on the powerful 9070 GPUs). But if you can tolerate some image softness, Hypr-RX is a killer solution that puts the performance pedal to the metal universally. It’s a fantastic, versatile tool. Nvidia reigns supreme in content and AI workloads We only ran a couple of non-gaming benchmarks – one focused on Adobe Premiere Pro performance via the fantastic PugetBench benchmark, and Procyon’s AI text generation benchmark, which assaults GPUs with a variety of large language model tests. The RTX 5070 absolutely stomped the Radeon RX 9070 series in both of these. If you use your graphics card for work as well as play, Nvidia remains the superior option despite AMD’s gaming and memory capacity dominance. There are no Radeon RX 9070 reference cards AMD Nvidia’s Founders Edition models are usually among the best GeForce options around. You won’t find an AMD equivalent this generation. All Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT models come from AMD partners like XFX, Sapphire, and Asus. AMD will not be releasing a reference “Made by AMD” version of these GPUs. That said, the Radeon RX 9070 series utilizes a pair of 8-pin power connectors as standard. Some custom models may opt for an Nvidia-esque 12-pin connector instead, while overclocked models like the Asus TUF sometimes add an additional 8-pin connector to add in power delivery and overclocking. The vast majority of Radeon 9070s will stick to a pair of 8-pins, but check to make sure your chosen GPU meets your power supply specs before you buy. Should you buy AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT? Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry The Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT are the new 1440p gaming champions. I’d definitely opt for those over the $549 GeForce RTX 5070, which is just a stagnant sidegrade over its predecessor. Don’t get me wrong: I adore DLSS 4’s Multi-Frame Generation and consider it truly transformative. The visual smoothness it provides must be seen to be believed. But the $549 Radeon RX 9070 slings frames an average of 11 percent faster than the 5070 if you remove outlier Black Myth Wukong. Paired with a full 16GB of memory and a wide bus that actually allows for 4K gaming, the Radeon RX 9070 feels like an all-around more compelling option for the price, especially now that ray tracing isn’t the Achilles’ Heel it once was for AMD. But really, the $599 Radeon RX 9070 XT is the graphics card you want if you can snag one. It features the same beefed-up 16GB memory configuration, but spits out frames a whopping 19 percent faster than the RTX 5070 for just $50 more. In fact, it punches closer to the $750 GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. Nvidia’s card is only 3 to 6 percent faster than the 9070 XT despite costing 25 percent more. So yeah: AMD has a pair of winners on its hands with the Radeon 9070 series. Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry It’s not quite a perfect landing though. We found AMD’s much-hyped new FSR 4 feature frustrating to (try to) use in real life; bad 1 percent low times in Returnal are a bit of a bummer; Nvidia maintains the lead in content and AI creation; we suffered some driver crashes on all tested 9070 GPUs; and while Hypr-RX is very cool, Radeon still has no answer for DLSS 4 Multi Frame Gen. But the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT offer such a compelling mix of performance, value, and memory capacity that it’s worth accepting those true, valid, concerning quibbles and hope AMD gets its software act together. Unlike the RTX 5070, AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 series pushes gaming performance forward. I hope AMD made a bunch of them. Read...

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It’s taken a couple years, but regional sports networks are starting to realize they charge too much to stream local games. NESN 360, which offers live streams of the Boston Red Sox and Bruins, just dropped its annual price from $330 to $240, while also throwing in four Red Sox tickets. Main Street Sports Group, which operates regional FanDuel Sports Network channels, has hinted at lower prices as well, and in some markets, local games stream for free or are available over-the-air with an antenna. What you’re witnessing are the first tweaks to a misguided sports streaming strategy, one that assumes high direct-to-consumer prices will discourage cord-cutting while offsetting the revenue losses linked to the decline of cable TV. That strategy hasn’t been working for regional sports networks, and it’s not going to work for the likes of ESPN and Fox, which plan to launch their own expensive streaming services later this year. A broken model The regional sports model—and live sports in general—used to be extremely lucrative. Sports networks earned per-subscriber fees from every cable customer, so they made money even from folks who never watched sports. That model’s been unraveling as more folks cancel their cable and satellite subscriptions. Most live TV streaming services don’t offer regional sports networks because they don’t bring in enough viewers to justify the cost, and those that do—namely DirecTV Stream and Fubo—relegate regional sports to more expensive tiers. Even on the cable side, Comcast has stopped offering regional sports in its base packages to keep prices down. Meanwhile, a growing proportion of cord-cutters are realizing they don’t need pay TV bundles at all. These trends have put regional sports networks in a bind. They don’t want to offer anything that would risk the easy money that still comes from cable, but they also can’t ignore their declining customer base and the growing proportion of viewers who’ve moved away from pay TV. The failed solution To address this dilemma, most regional sports networks have opted to charge excessive rates for standalone streaming. FanDuel Sports Network, for instance, only costs between $3 to $8 per month as part of a cable bundle, yet it costs $20 per month on its own. NESN’s carriage fee was a little over $5 per month as of 2021, yet NESN 360 costs $30 per month. The thinking goes that if standalone streaming is expensive enough, it’ll reach a new generation of cable-free superfans without actively encouraging more cord-cutting. Too bad the strategy isn’t working. When FanDuel Sports Network’s streaming service launched in 2022 (under the name Bally Sports+), its owners hoped it would eventually reach 4.4 million subscribers. The actual subscriber count today is only around a half-million, and now it projects to reach a less-ambitious 2.8 million subscribers by 2027. Meanwhile, the channel has lost 22 million pay TV subscribers over the past four years, and by 2027 its owners expect to lose 6 million more. The truth is that there just aren’t aren’t enough people willing to pay $20 to $30 per month for regional sports, nor are there enough people willing to keep expensive pay TV packages just to watch those channels. Like a lot of streamers, the regional sports networks have underestimated peoples’ ability to tune out. Lowering the paywall All this brings us to the news that NESN 360 is cutting the price of annual plans, from $330 to $240. The service’s monthly plan still costs $30, but the annual option will make a lot more sense for year-round Boston sports fans, especially with Red Sox tickets thrown in. Speaking to Mollie Cahillane at Sports Business Journal, NESN president David Wisnia acknowledged that it was asking too much. “Inflation is high,” he said. “There’s a saturation limit in terms of DTC [direct-to-consumer] right now, and we wanted to get into people’s homes and make it as available as we can, while balancing the financials of it and making sure it still makes sense for us.” NESN isn’t alone in changing its tune. Last month, Main Street Sports Group CEO David Preschlack told CNBC’s Alexander Sherman that the company is considering price cuts for FanDuel Sports Network as well. “We have the ability to go lower, and we’re going to test different price points, absolutely,” he said. Meanwhile, some teams are already embracing a philosophy of long-term reach over short-term subscription revenues. In Utah, a subscription to watch local Jazz games still costs $20 per month, but you can also watch for free with an antenna or your can stream individual games for $5 each. Jazz owner Ryan Smith told Sherman he’d never go back to the old model. “The more people watch, the more people come to games, the more we sell in concessions, the more money we bring in with sponsorships,” Smith said. Omens for ESPN and Fox The strategy of charging high standalone rates for sports streaming isn’t just going to be troublesome for regional sports networks. This year, both ESPN and Fox plan to launch their own standalone services. ESPN’s is rumored to cost between $25 and $30 per month, and Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch has told investors that it will intentionally charge a high price, so as not to cannibalize its pay TV business. “We don’t want, and we have no intention of, turning a traditional distribution customer into our direct-to-consumer customer,” Murdoch said. “So, our subscriber expectations will be modest, and we’re going to price the service accordingly.” Good luck with that. If sports fans are balking at $30 per month to watch their favorite teams every day or two, why would casual sports fans pay similar prices for a smattering of nationally televised games they might not even care about? Moreover, what’s even the point of offering a service whose price is intentionally unappealing? Regional sports networks are already failing at the same strategy, and the national sports networks will be next. What’s the solution? Sports streamers still have to pay astronomical costs for live sports rights, and those costs aren’t coming down anytime soon. That means direct-to-consumer streaming probably won’t get much cheaper on its own. What we’ll likely see instead is more attractive and flexible bundling. Disney and Max are already finding success bundling their non-sports streaming services together at a discount, and Disney could pursue something similar for ESPN with Fox’s streaming service. Perhaps they could also offer regional sports add-ons at lower-than-standalone rates. Instead of making everyone pay for sports, they can offer fairer pricing by putting lots of sports in one place. Sports networks have spent far too long trying to prop up traditional TV packages with little to show for it. They’d be wise to start building something better to replace it. Sign up for Jared’s Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter for more streaming TV insights. Read...

After more than a year out of sight, Alexa+–the new Alexa with its AI-powered revamp–took center stage at a crowded coming-out party in New York City on Wednesday, and I got a first-hand look at what this turbocharged voice assistant can do.  Following the big unveiling, we were all led to a demonstration hall with about a half-dozen break-out rooms, where we were able to see and hear—but not participate in—Alexa’s new conversational tricks, from controlling smart home devices and researching sports tickets to suggesting recipes and dialing up tunes on Amazon Prime Video.  If all that sounds like old hat, consider this: While the old Alexa requires falling back into what Amazon devices head Panos Panay rightfully described as “Alexa-speak,” the new Alexa is a far more flexible and understanding companion, capable of sussing out your intentions from the vaguest of queries, and—at least, from what I saw on Wednesday—getting it right more than it failed.   While the demonstrations we saw appeared carefully choreographed, we were frequently assured that what we were seeing and hearing was the “live” Alexa+, rather than a canned demo—and from someone who’s spent a fair amount of time with ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode, the exchanges sounded genuine.  Here are my biggest takeaways after sitting through Amazon’s Alexa+ show-and-tell, starting with… Alexa+ didn’t make many mistakes  Naturally, everyone’s waiting for the new AI-powered Alexa to bungle a command or start hallucinating, but the demos I saw on Wednesday went surprisingly smoothly.  Granted, the Amazon presenters on hand were likely sticking to a pre-arranged script, asking the same questions and issuing the same commands over and over.   Still, the questions and queries were open-ended enough to invite mistakes. Yet I witnessed only one genuine screw-up on Alexa+’s part: When asked to move a music selection to a speaker in “the office,” it instead began playing an episode of The Office on Peacock. Oops!  On a few other occasions, Alexa+ appeared to freeze when asked a question, but those pauses could be chalked up to the din of the demonstration hall (I myself had a difficult time hearing) and/or an overloaded Wi-Fi network.  Alexa+ could make controlling the smart home much easier  One of the biggest pain points when using voice assistants to control smart home devices is the dreaded, “Sorry, I don’t know which light bulb you mean,” or “I can’t help with that.” It’s gotten so bad lately that I almost never use my smart speakers for smart home control anymore, relying instead on apps, routines, or old-fashioned buttons and switches.  Alexa+ promises to get us using our smart speakers again, thanks mainly to its ability to ponder what we’re saying and then deducing what our intentions are.  For example, in one demo, Alexa+ was asked to turn on the light in the “sitting room,” an area (we were told) that hadn’t been previously defined within the smart home setup. The new Alexa turned on a lamp positioned near a sofa, correctly guessing that the light was located in a sitting area. Of course, a home might have several different potential “sitting areas” with multiple lamps next to sofas, but the demonstration does show how Alexa+ can get creative (hopefully not too creative) when it comes to understanding smart home commands.  We also saw how Alexa+ can pull up videos from your Ring history, plucking out selections based on queries like, “Show me when the kids were playing in the snow,” as well as (in a separate demo) how Alexa+ could make it way easier to move music from one smart speaker to another, cutting down on those irksome “Sorry, I don’t see a dining room speaker” flubs.   Just ask, and Alexa+ can call up clips from your Ring video history. Ben Patterson/Foundry Finally, there’s the promise of Alexa+ creating routines based on natural-language voice prompts. For example, this query: “The family is having a hard time getting ready for bed at night, can you help create a routine to solve that,” yielded this automation: “Every night at 9 p.m., Alexa will announce ‘it’s time to get ready for bed’ on all devices, then all the lights will dim to 50 percent brightness before turning off completely.” Not bad, and you can always follow up with tweaks to perfect the routine.  Alexa+ can create routines based on natural-launguage queries. Ben Patterson/Foundry It could be a game-changer in the kitchen  I’ve recently been fascinated by how generative AI can make an excellent cook’s companion, crafting recipes on the fly and making suggestions on ingredient substitutions, but Alexa+ could take those abilities to the next level.  Besides the fact that the new Alexa can operate from a kitchen smart display–a far easier setup than juggling a phone with slimy food hands—Alexa+ can remember what ingredients you have (you will need to tell it or show it what’s in your cupboard or fridge), and it can also take note of who in the family likes what, then order the proper ingredients on Amazon Fresh or another supported online grocery store (“supported” is the key word; more on that in a moment).  I also like the fact that Alexa+ sources thousands of recipes from partner publications—meaning it’s not just scraping recipes off the web and then concocting its own versions (with sometimes questionable results).  It can be a little too chatty  Similar to the classic Alexa, the new AI Alexa can be something of a motor mouth, nattering on excitedly about how it “loves” that song you picked, praising you for “hitting the nail on the head,” opining that a certain TV show is the “perfect antidote to the Sunday blues,” and so on.  Such verbal flourishes will be familiar to anyone who’s chatted with ChatGPT in Advanced Voice Mode, and the sycophantic buttering-up gets tiresome after awhile. I can certainly imagine times when I’d want Alexa+ to simply tee up a playlist without the asides.  Luckily, I was told that it will be possible to tone down Alexa+’s responses with a prompt like, “Simpler please.”  Alexa+ works the best with Amazon partners The amount of tasks that Alexa+ can actually do, from teeing up music tracks to booking dinner reservations, scheduling events and service appointments is impressive, and stands in contrast to how ChatGPT and Google Gemini are still fairly isolated within their respective chatboxes. (Gemini is taking its first steps in the smart home via extensions in the Gemini app.)  But many of Alexa+’s abilities are tied to service providers that have already partnered with Amazon. So, you can book a carpet cleaning appointment thanks to Alexa’s integration with Thumbtack, you can’t book an annual checkup through ZocDoc, which hasn’t teamed up with Amazon–at least not yet.  And while Alexa+ will be able to order groceries from Amazon services like Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods, it probably won’t be much help for a FreshDirect customer like me (or at least not until FreshDirect forges an alliance with Amazon).  Many of Alexa+’s coolest abilities are tied to those services that have partnered with Amazon.Ben Patterson/Foundry You’ll need to trust Alexa+ with an awful lot of personal info  Some of the most impressive demos during Wednesday’s unveiling involved Alexa+’s abilities to absorb lengthy documents—including personal ones—which it can then summarize and answer questions about. In one example, the new Alexa poured over a complex homeowners association agreement, explaining the various rules and plucking out key details.  Alexa+ can also remember personal preferences, such as favorite restaurants, who your best friends are, what music genres you favor, and so on. The more Alexa+ knows about you, the more powerful it gets as a personal assistant.  But as with the “classic” Alexa, privacy will surely be a thorny issue with Alexa+, and one should probably think twice before allowing the AI to scour sensitive documents like health or financial records.  For its part, Amazon says the new Alexa is designed to “protect [the] privacy and security” of its customers, while providing “transparency and control.” Amazon also notes that it will “centralize” privacy controls, while promising “world-class privacy and security protection” through the “secure infrastructure” of Amazon Web Services.  Echo display owners will get first dibs on Alexa+  The new Alexa will work on “almost all” existing Echo devices, including the diminutive Echo Dot, I’m told. (Some of the “earliest” Amazon smart speakers won’t work with Alexa+, including the first-generations of the Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Plus.)  That said, you’ll need to be the owner of an Echo Show display to get first dibs on the new Alexa. Amazon is rolling out Alexa+ in phases (starting in the “coming weeks”), and owners of Echo devices with displays—including the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21—will get access first. If you do become an early Alexa+ user, the new assistant will work across all your compatible Echo devices, including speaker-only products like the Echo Dot.  [Further reading: These are the best smart speakers and displays] Alexa+ will be a great Prime perk  Once the free early access period is up, Amazon will charge $19.99 a month for Alexa+. “Ouch,” I initially thought, but that wasn’t the full story.  As it turns out, Alexa+ will be free for Prime members, making the new Alexa the latest Prime benefit. That’s terrific news for those (many) of us already shelling out for Prime, and thus making it far more likely that a lapsed Alexa user like me will give the new AI-enhanced version a go. Read...