In summary
- Amazon’s long-awaited AI update to Alexa is set to hit the market in October, but it won’t be free.
- The revamped Alexa, dubbed “Remarkable Alexa” or “Project Banyan,” could come with a monthly fee of between $5 and $10, on top of Prime memberships.
- The new AI-powered Alexa promises more human-like conversations, recognition of individual voices and personalized suggestions based on past conversations.
Amazon’s long-awaited AI update to Alexa is set to hit the market in October — but it won’t be free. That’s according to internal documents obtained by The Washington Post, which revealed the tech giant’s plans to launch a subscription-based version of its voice assistant, packed with new AI-powered features.
The revamped Alexa, dubbed “Remarkable Alexa” or “Project Banyan,” could come with a monthly fee of between $5 and $10, separate from Prime memberships, the news outlet reported. But don’t worry, the free “classic” version isn’t going away.
The Washington Post says the new AI-powered Alexa promises more human-like conversations. It will recognize individual voices, ask personal questions, and use that information to tailor its responses. For example, Alexa could offer better suggestions for a weekend activity based on its past conversations, so it won’t recommend hiking for people who don’t like to go on hikes.
The report also teases more capabilities like providing daily news summaries, finding recipes that fit your dietary quirks, and even having a specific tone for interacting with kids (with parental controls, of course). It’s all part of Amazon’s plan to keep users hooked on Alexa and squeeze some profit out of the previously unprofitable home assistant.
For shopping addicts, the new, improved version of Alexa will answer detailed questions about products, search for deals and even notify users when their desired item is on sale, the Post noted. Amazon is betting big that these features will boost both subscriptions and overall sales.
This AI redesign has been in the works for over a year, as a response to the ChatGPT revolution that led tech companies to scramble to up their AI game. In September 2023, Decrypt reported that Amazon began working on an advanced LLM that would power its Alexa suite of devices.
“To our knowledge, this is the largest integration of an LLM, real-time services, and a set of devices, and it’s not limited to a tab in a browser,” Amazon said at the time. “And we’re just getting started — with generative AI, we can also improve several key components of the Alexa experience.”
Efforts for a new proprietary language model came about after a partnership between Amazon and Anthropic (developers of Claude AI) was revealed. Amazon began training its LLM on a large corpus of data collected by Amazon through its interactions with all Alexa users. After some controversy, the company clarified that there was an option to opt out and still enjoy all the features offered by Amazon.
“(Amazon) has always believed that training Alexa with real-world requests is essential to delivering a customer experience that is accurate, personalized, and constantly improving,” an Amazon spokesperson told Decrypt, “But at the same time, we give customers control over whether their Alexa voice recordings are used to improve the service, and we always respect our customers’ preferences when training our models.”
In November 2023, Amazon launched Q, an AI-powered assistant for enterprise applications. This launch marked Amazon’s entry into the enterprise AI assistant market, competing directly with established offerings such as ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot.
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