Amazon
Makes Alexa+, the Nova models, Kiro and AI services on AWS.
- Type
- AI lab
- Last shipped
- Oct 28, 2026
Products
Everything Amazon shipped
October 2026
- LaunchAlexa+
Alexa+ now runs on five new redesigned Echo devices, including Echo Studio with Home Camera, with more natural conversations and multi-step request handling.
What this means for you: Alexa+ now runs on five redesigned Echo devices. You can talk to it more naturally and give it requests with several steps in them. The lineup includes Echo Studio with Home Camera, Echo Time for the nightstand, Alexa Photo Frame, Echo Show 16 and a reimagined Echo Dot.
Why it matters: It follows the Oct 8 launch of Alexa+ on three Alexa Tablets, Amazon's first tablets, so Alexa+ now reaches a wider set of devices.
How to use it: The five devices are Echo Studio with Home Camera, Echo Time, Alexa Photo Frame, Echo Show 16 and the new Echo Dot. The Echo Dot has a built-in smart home hub for the first time, plus an eero WiFi extender. Echo Time has a customizable screen and sleep sensing. Echo Show 16 has a 16-inch anti-glare display.
I'm deciding between the new Echo devices that run Alexa+: Echo Studio with Home Camera, Echo Time, Alexa Photo Frame, Echo Show 16 and the new Echo Dot. Help me choose one for [room or use]. Ask me what I need, then compare the options based on their features and recommend one.
- New modelKiro
Kiro added Claude Haiku 5.5 to the IDE, CLI, Web, and Crew, priced at 0.06x credits.
What this means for you: Claude Haiku 5.5 is now available in Kiro, in the IDE, CLI, Web and Crew. It suits parallel subagents (several helper agents working at once), quick reviews and small edits across many files.
How to use it: Choose Claude Haiku 5.5 in Kiro's IDE, CLI, Web or Crew. It costs 0.06x credits.
- AvailabilityKiro
Kiro for students expands to 41 more universities, giving students at eligible schools one free year with 1,000 credits per month and premium models.
What this means for you: Students at eligible universities get Kiro free for one year. That includes 1,000 credits each month (the units Kiro uses to measure how much work you run) and paid features such as premium models. The list of 41 newly added universities is on Kiro's linked page.
How to use it: Check the full list of eligible universities at http://spr.ly/6016BHltIY. Students at every eligible school get the free year.
I'm a student at [university name] and just learned Kiro, Amazon's coding agent that plans before it builds, is free for one year at eligible schools with 1,000 credits a month. Help me plan a first project to build with it for [class or personal goal], and how to spend my monthly credits.
- Launch
Amazon open sourced TorchNeuron, a PyTorch backend that runs PyTorch code on AWS Trainium chips with minimal or no code changes, for developers.
- New model
Amazon released 8B and 32B hybrid language models built with a new priming method that reuses pretrained Transformer weights at under 1% of training cost.
What this means for you: Amazon released two language models, one with 8 billion and one with 32 billion parameters (the numbers that set a model's size). They are "hybrid" models, built by reusing the parts of an existing Transformer model instead of training a new one from zero. Amazon says they give the same quality with twice the throughput and half the memory.
- New featureKiro
Kiro IDE and CLI now have Memory, which carries forward user preferences, repo conventions, corrections, and ruled-out approaches, and lets users view and manage what is remembered.
What this means for you: Kiro, Amazon's coding assistant, can now remember your preferences, your project's habits, corrections you made, and approaches you already ruled out. It brings them back when they matter, so you stop re-explaining the same things. You can see and manage what it remembers at any time.
- New modelKiro
Kiro added Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, an open-weight model with 2.8T parameters, for users to select.
What this means for you: Kiro now lets you pick Kimi K3, an open-weight model (one whose trained settings are published for anyone to use), when you work on code. It is described as having room to hold your entire repo (the folder of a project's files) and spec (the written plan) in a single pass.
How to use it: Kimi K3 is available in Kiro now. Select it from the models you can choose in Kiro. The post links to a getting-started page.
- New featureKiro
Kiro IDE and CLI local sandboxing is now generally available on macOS, Linux, and Windows, giving agent-run commands scoped file and network access.
What this means for you: When the AI agent runs commands on your own computer, Kiro can now limit which files and which network connections those commands can touch. This is called sandboxing, meaning the agent works inside set boundaries.
How to use it: Local sandboxing is generally available in both Kiro IDE and Kiro CLI on macOS, Linux and Windows.
- AvailabilityAlexa+
Alexa+ comes built into the core of three new Amazon Alexa Tablets, its first tablets, offering answers, smart home control and on-screen help.
- New modelKiro
Kiro added Claude Sonnet 5.5 for Pro, Pro+, Pro Max, and Power tier users.
September 2026
- LaunchKiro
Kiro workflows are now generally available, letting users sequence agent work, run it in parallel, loop on results, and vary agents, models, and effort by step.
- New modelKiro
Kiro added Claude Opus 5.5 to the IDE, CLI, and Crew, described as 40% cheaper than Opus 5.
- New modelKiro
Kiro made Claude Fable 5.1 available to enterprise customers.
- AvailabilityKiro
Kiro for students expanded to 121 new universities across 16 countries, offering a free year, 1,000 credits per month, premium models, and Kiro Web.
- New feature
Amazon added an "Update Me When" option to Alexa for Shopping that tracks new releases across Amazon and the web for shoppers.
- LaunchKiro
Kiro Web and cloud sessions are now generally available with cloud configuration, so sessions can be resumed from browser, CLI, IDE, mobile, or another machine.
- New featureKiro
KiroCrew 0.4.0 adds a dashboard users can work inside, signed installers for Windows and Linux, and WhatsApp, iMessage, and Feishu channels.
August 2026
- New modelKiro
Kiro added GPT-5.6 for developers.