Amazon.com Inc.’s long-awaited reboot of its digital assistant Alexa debuted Wednesday with a generative artificial intelligence (AI) engine and, for the first time, a monthly subscription fee.
Called Alexa+, the next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) assistant was unfurled at a splashy news conference in New York.
Alexa+ works on “almost every” Alexa device the company has shipped, it added, and will cost $19.99 a month, or free for Amazon Prime members, when it is available next month. A monthly fee would ostensibly help Amazon offset steep AI development costs and bring in revenue, analysts said.
“Every once in a while, a technology comes around and it changes everything,” Panos Panay, Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services, said onstage Wednesday. “[Large language models] enter the stage and fundamentally change the way we think about AI … It’s shaken up everything.”
Using a broad slate of state-of-the-art training models from Amazon-backed startup Anthropic, and Amazon’s in-house GenAI model family Nova, the new Alexa is capable of buying concert tickets, ordering groceries, booking dinner reservations and organizing and recalling information from handwritten documents, according to Amazon.
The so-called “model agnostic” design unleashes what might be considered agentic features. For example, Alexa+ employs a system of experts for specific tasks to orchestrate Amazon services as well as those from third parties such as AI music startup Suno, the company said.
Daniel Rausch, Amazon’s vice president of Alexa and Fire TV, deemed the latest incarnation of Alexa a “complete re-architecture.” He said Alexa draws on Bedrock, its cloud platform that lets organizations experiment with GenAI models, to undergird its capabilities.
Alexa’s major facelift is considered essential to maintain its relevance in the face of major competition from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which debuted in late 2022 and blew by voice assistants with its ability to perform complex functions like coding software and writing prose.
Consequently, Alexa has continued to struggle in turning a profit. Indeed, Amazon has lost tens of billions of dollars on its device lineup that includes Alexa, Echo, Kindle, Fire TV and other products, according to a Wall Street Journal report last year.
Despite his best efforts to make Alexa an all-encompassing device like something out of his beloved “Star Trek,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has experienced disappointment with his passion project.
Since its launch more than a decade ago, Alexa helped establish the e-tail and cloud giant as an early global leader in voice software, with more than 500 million Alexa devices in use. But its functionality until recently has been eclipsed by chatbots on smartphones — not smart speakers, where Alexa largely resides.
