Amazon's long-awaited AI upgrade for Alexa is set to launch this October, but it won't be free, according to internal documents obtained by The Washington Post that reveal the tech giant's plans to roll out a subscription version of the voice assistant packed with new AI-powered features.
The improved Alexa, dubbed “Remarkable Alexa” or “Project Banyan,” could cost $5 to $10 a month on top of Prime membership, according to the paper, but don't panic: The free “Classic” version isn't going away.
According to The Washington Post, the new AI-powered Alexa promises to have a more human-like conversation: Alexa will recognize individual voices, ask personal questions, and use that information to customize responses. For example, Alexa might make better suggestions for weekend activities based on past chats, so it won't recommend hiking if you don't like going on long trips.
The report also previews many more features, such as providing a daily news summary, finding recipes that fit your eating habits, and even offering specific tones for interacting with kids (with parental controls, of course) — all part of Amazon's plan to draw users to Alexa and cash in on its previously unprofitable home assistant.
For shoppers, the upgraded Alexa will be able to answer detailed product questions, find deals, and even notify users when a desired item goes on sale, The Washington Post noted — features that Amazon is hopeful will drive both subscriptions and overall sales.
This AI overhaul has been in the works for over a year now, in response to the ChatGPT revolution that sparked a rush from tech companies to beef up their AI. In September 2023, Decrypt reported that Amazon had begun developing an advanced LLM to power its Alexa hardware suite.
“To our knowledge, this is the largest integration of LLM, real-time services, and a suite of devices that isn't limited to a browser tab,” Amazon said at the time. “And we're just getting started. Generative AI will also power some of the core components of the Alexa experience.”
The work on the new proprietary language model came after Amazon revealed its partnership with Anthropic (the developers of Claude AI). Amazon began training the LLM using a vast corpus of data collected through interactions with all Alexa users. After some controversy, Amazon clarified that there is an option to opt out and still get all the features Amazon has to offer.
“[Amazon]has always believed that training Alexa with real-world requests is essential to delivering an accurate, personalized, and constantly improving customer experience,” an Amazon spokesperson told Decrypt, “But alongside that, we give customers control over whether their Alexa voice recordings are used to improve our services, and we always respect their preferences when training our models.”
In November 2023, Amazon released Q, an AI-powered assistant for business applications. The release marks Amazon's entry into the enterprise AI assistant market, competing directly with existing products such as ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot.
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