Amazon’s Send to Alexa Plus makes the Kindle Scribe feel more like a productivity device

Amazon’s rolling out a new “Send to Alexa Plus” feature to the latest Kindle Scribe and Kindle Scribe Colorsoft owners starting February 12. The feature lets you send your notes or documents to Amazon’s AI-powered Alexa Plus assistant, which can then summarize them, turn them into to-do lists, calendar events, or reminders, as well as help brainstorm, and offer project guidance.

I spent about a day or so testing it primarily to help with caregiving tasks, and it was mostly helpful despite some limitations. It works best when asked to digest information into something actionable. It accurately summarized my handwritten notes and PDF documents, even across different templates or hard-to-read text colors, and it worked well for logistics, like turning my notes about my mom’s next appointment into calendar events and reminders with helpful context.

I also tested how well it answered questions about my notes and documents, provided guidance, and handled brainstorming. In one test, while I was on hold with Medi-Cal for three hours, my Echo Show 8 read back key information from a dispute letter I had written earlier. I also sent a PDF of an email and asked it to add up a list of charges, which it calculated correctly. It was also good at pulling specific details. In one case, I wrote “Blue Shield” in messy handwriting without labeling it as an insurance company, and it still identified it from context.

In another test, I wrote notes for someone who was taking my mom to an appointment and intentionally left out details like the address. After I clicked “Share” and “Send to Alexa,” I asked what might be missing from the note. Alexa received the note and suggested adding the address, doctor’s name, medication list, and questions to ask. It also generated a decent draft when I asked for help brainstorming a phone script for arguing with the insurance company, though unfortunately Alexa couldn’t actually apply those changes to the original Scribe note. I wasn’t able to send the full version to my email address either, sadly; I could, however, view the draft in the “chat history” section of the Alexa app.

Where it struggled was depth and nuance. I wanted to test how useful it could be for, say, quizzing yourself on a piece, so I sent myself a copy of my old Kindle Scribe review and another article. It took four or five tries to generate a detailed outline, and it sometimes missed small but meaningful distinctions, like interpreting “AI-powered summarization feature” as just “AI-powered feature.” That was a problem as it marked answers as correct when they were only partially right.

Send to Alexa Plus isn’t perfect, but overall it’s genuinely useful and gives Amazon an edge over rivals like the Kobo Elipsa 2E, which lack voice assistant integration. The Elipsa 2E is still my favorite because it covers the basics better — notably, it’s much easier to annotate ebooks— but the Scribe is getting easier to recommend if you’re in Amazon’s ecosystem.