We've just reached peak AI – Alexa+ will now swear at you

Amazon has announced a range of "personality styles" for Alexa, including one that will use "censored profanity", that's not available when Amazon Kids is enabled.

There are new personalities for Alexa+, which balance (in Amazon's words) expressiveness, emotional openness, formality, directness and humour. Using these combinations results in Brief, Chill, Sweet (announced earlier in the year) and Sassy – with the latter being the style that can't mind its Ps and Qs.

With Alexa+ not yet available in the UK, but promised for 2026, I've not been able to test the sweary version of the AI assistant myself, but over at Engadget, Lawrence Bonk reports that he managed to make Alexa say "damn" and "hell".

He didn't manage to tempt it into anything more profane though, so we don't quite know how that censorship might happen.

It certainly seems that Alexa isn't going to start swearing like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, but it does beg the question of whether anyone wants the additional verbal abuse from its friendly neighbourhood AI?

AI is known for being verbose: I've been using Gemini for some time and it really can go on and on, well beyond answering the question. That's something that users have reported for Alexa+ too, both on Amazon's own forums, as well as on Reddit, so I suspect that "Brief" might be the option that people go for.

What other Alexa+ personalities are there?

While Chill is designed to bring you "easy going and relaxed energy" and Sweet "is your biggest cheerleader", the dead-eye efficiency we expected from The Terminator movies doesn't seem to arrived with actual AI.

As they try to be more human, AI systems have become irritatingly artificial, from ChatGPT's stumbling "ums" and "errs", to the grovelling apologies when a system gets a simple question completely wrong.

To change the Alexa+ voice and personality you can just ask Alexa+ to "change your personality style" but be warned that this isn't a universal change, it's specific to each device. That at least means that the Echo in the office can be tight and precise, while the Echo Show in the den can swear like Roy Kent in Ted Lasso (or not).

Amazon says that this is just the start for Alexa+ and as the company gets more feedback, there will be more refinement so that everyone gets the unique Alexa+ experience that they want.

Of course, Amazon will probably know how popular each of these different personalities is: if everyone is choosing Brief, it's great feedback that Alexa+ waffles too much.