Welcome to Lowpass! This week: Amazon announces its LLM-powered Alexa+ assistant, and Niantic goes native on the Meta Quest.

Everything you need to know about Alexa+

On Wednesday, Amazon finally unveiled its take on the future of voice assistants: Alexa+, a completely rebuilt version of Alexa that makes use of LLMs to help people organize their life, manage their smart home and improve their entertainment experience. Amazon had first announced its plans for a new Alexa in the summer of 2023, but then reportedly delayed its launch because it simply wasn’t up to the task.

Now, the company is ready to make Alexa+ available to its customers, starting with those who own certain Echo Show smart displays, at the end of March. Alexa+ will also come to Fire TVs, Echo speakers without displays, the Alexa mobile app and a new web app. Access to Alexa+ will cost consumers $19.99 per month, but most Echo Show owners likely won’t have to pay: Amazon Prime customers will get access free of charge, which means that the new assistant will have millions of potential users out of the gate.

With that in mind, I figured it’s worth taking a look at what Alexa+ means for the entertainment industry, both when it comes to direct integrations as well as potential roadblocks that could hold back this LLM-powered voice assistant future. Here’s all you need to know:

How Alexa+ will enable new entertainment experiences. Music, podcasts and video have long been mainstays on smart speakers and displays, and Alexa+ is building on that with a range of new experiences.

Niantic brings Gaussian splats to VR

Pokemon Go maker Niantic took another step towards its XR future this week: The company launched a native XR app for its Scaniverse service on Meta’s Quest headset Wednesday, making it even easier to explore 3D scans from all around the world in VR.

Gaussian splatting is a relatively new way to capture content in 3D, and Niantic has been one of the major backers of the technology: The company incorporated splatting into its Scaniverse capture app last year, and began making some of those catores available via a web app in VR late last year. I wrote about all of this for The Verge in January, calling splats “the tech to build the holodeck.”

Now, Niantic took the next step by going native on Quest. The app looks very similar to its web app predecessor, but I did find it more stable than the web experience, which occasionally crashed while I was looking at individual scans.

The app puts you into the gondola of a hot air balloon circling the earth, with pins showing the locations of individual scans ready to explore. You can also explore your own scans in VR, both privately and publicly shared. At launch, the app already offers access to more than 50,000 scans, including sculptures and landmarks from around the world.

For Niantic, Scaniverse is more than just a tech experiment: The company has been busy building a 3D map of the world that could one day be used to anchor geospatial information for future AR glasses. Niantic appears to be doubling down on becoming a platform provider for geospatial AR, with recent reports indicating that it may sell Pokemon Go for a whopping $3.5 billion.

What else

Netflix is building an anti-Disneyland. My latest for Sherwood News: A look at Netflix’s live experiences business, which now includes a Las Vegas strip restaurant.

YouTube podcasts surpass one billion MAUs. That’s according to YouTube. Also, holy moly.

Max rejiggers its plans for CNN, Bleacher Report. Content from CNN and Bleacher will be exclusive to the ad-free Max tier starting next month.

Valve rumored to launch new VR headset this year. The Vive Index successor is supposedly going to cost $1200.

Warner Bros Games closes three studios. The WBD subsidiary is also cancelling development of a Wonder Woman game.

Sony lowers PSVR 2 price to $399. That’s down from $549, and following reports that the PlayStation VR headset wasn’t selling as expected.

How ‘The Substance’ helped Mubi break through. A well-deserved success story for one of the industry’s most unique streaming services.

Instagram considers launching a standalone Reels app. Remember IGTV? Neither does Instagram, apparently.

That’s it

I can’t decide if this is a puzzling outlier, a case of something lost in translation, or a sign of things to come: Amazon apparently just launched a TV network in Germany — or at least something the company is calling a TV network: German Amazon Prime subscribers can now access a new linear channel called “Amazon Prime” in the Prime Video app. (Feel free to add your own Yo Dawg meme here). The network will show highlights from the Prime Video library as well as select live sports events. It’s basically a FAST channel, but Amazon insists on marketing it as a new TV network. What’s next? An Amazon-owned physical retail store? Oh wait …

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend everyone!

And many thanks to Whale TV for sponsoring this issue of Lowpass.