Your Echo Dot speaker just got a lot more cheerful, thanks to this Alexa+ personality upgrade

Have you ever felt like your Echo Dot smart speaker is too chatty? Or maybe you want it to be even friendlier? Amazon has just upgraded Alexa+ with three new personalities, so you can completely customise how the voice assistant interacts with you.

The three Alexa+ personalities are Brief, Chill and Sweet. Each personality is built on five metrics: expressiveness, emotional openness, formality, directness and humour. Depending on your mood, you can choose Alexa+ to be formal, laidback or super chatty when answering your questions or reading out your schedule.

The Brief style does exactly as it says on the tin – it’ll respond to you briefly and directly without small talk or extra follow-up responses. For example, if you say “Alexa, how’s it going?”, the Brief response will be “Operating efficiently.”

Chill is much more easy-going and is almost the middleman between Brief and Sweet. The Chill style is relaxed, easy breezy, and will respond to “Alexa, how’s it going?” with responses like “Life’s treating me well – all systems are Zen and the digital universe is spinning in harmony.”

For those who want Alexa+ to be their own personal cheerleader, the Sweet style will be your favourite. Aggressively warm, enthusiastic and encouraging, Sweet will respond with replies like “Absolutely fantastic! I’m radiating pure joy and ready to make your day incredibly amazing!”

The new Alexa+ personalities are available to use now, although it’s worth noting that Alexa+ is available to US customers and hasn’t been widely released in the UK just yet. To use the new Alexa+ personalities, choose your device in the Alexa app, go to Device Settings and click Alexa’s Personality Style to choose between Brief, Chill or Sweet.

Alternatively, you can change the personalities with “Alexa, change your personality style.” Users can switch between the three personality types, and you can go back to the standard Alexa voice if you want to.

Personally, I’d pick the Chill style as it seems to be a comfortable middle between being too brief and being overly friendly. Amazon could release additional personalities in the future but this hasn’t been officially confirmed.