After launching in the U.S. in March, Amazon is expanding the footprint of the new digital assistant to Canada.

This is an upgrade to the regular Alexa that can either cost $27.99 per month or be bundled with an existing Prime Membership, which will make it relatively cheap for a lot of Canadians who already have Prime subscriptions.

If you buy some of the new Amazon hardware, like the new Echo Show 8 or 11, you’ll get access to the new Alexa immediately. However, people with older hardware will need to wait, though Amazon says that tens of thousands of people will gain access each week.

To improve the assistant, Amazon has tuned the new AI to sound distinctly Canadian, but beyond throwing in various stereotypes like mentioning hockey, mispronouncing Zamboni and saying its favourite Timbit is one that isn’t even sold in Canada anymore, it mostly sounded like a regular robot voice to me.

Like many other AI tools, Amazon demonstrated its ability to extract information from emails or photos, including dates and context. That said, you do need to forward the emails to a custom Alexa+ email address that you will find in the Alexa app.

The new assistant can also remember your preferences. At the launch, the company asked for some dinner recommendations, and it was able to remember that one of the people in that Amazon family account didn’t like mushrooms.

Amazon says that in the U.S., customers are using Alexa+ twice as much as regular Alexa. However, time will tell if that holds up to be true in Canada. The company shared that Canada is a huge market for music streaming on Echo hardware, with 50 million hours of music being listened to each month. With Alexa+, you can ask for lyrics or describe a song, and it will do a better job at playing the song you want.

All in all, from what I saw, it appeared to give you slightly wider-ranging responses than what I’m used to with regular Alexa, but in the end, it accomplished a lot of the same tasks around the home that regular Alexa does. It plays music, it controls smart home tech, and it can update you on the weather or news. It does seem to do all of this a little better as well.