Amazon is reportedly working on an upgraded and AI-powered version of its ubiquitous personal assistant Alexa – and you might have to pay for it.
At its Device and Services event in September, Amazon announced that the Alexa voice assistant will get new generative AI upgrades to improve its communication capabilities.
Business insider reports that the upgraded version of Alexa is internally called ‘Remarkable Alexa’ and will launch as ‘Alexa Plus’ – suggesting it will be subscription-based. The company is said to be keeping June 30 in mind as the launch date for the service.
The report comes as other companies begin to roll out AI integrations. Microsoft has unveiled a subscription service for its AI assistant Copilot, which will be integrated into Windows 11 keyboards. And Google is combining two voice assistant services into one, with Assistant with Bard expected to arrive this year.
Amazon has not commented on the report and we have no information on how much a subscription might cost, or how it will be rolled out to Alexa devices.
According to Business Insider, the upgraded version of Alexa will have exclusive AI features, allowing you to have more natural conversations with the assistant, similar to ChatGPT, and provide a more personalized experience – for example: Tom’s guide reports that Alexa Plus will have the ability to distinguish between pauses in speech and the speaker completing a request.
However, at this point, Alexa Plus is said to be far from the finished product. The report says it is currently being tested by 15,000 people, and these tests have revealed several flaws in Amazon’s new take on the voice assistant service.
For starters, the voice recognition quality of Alexa Plus may not live up to expectations. While the voice assistant offers more personalized conversations, the responses are reportedly distracting and contain inaccurate information, issues that could mean a delayed launch.
These issues are said to be related to disagreements over the direction of the Alexa upgrade, with several people who developed the original Alexa, internally called ‘Classic Alexa’, reportedly pushing for their work to be included in the upgrade.
According to Business Insider, the key to bringing the new AI features to Alexa Plus is a new large language model (LLM) codenamed Olympus, and the requirement to combine old and new Alexa technologies is “resulting in a more bloated technology stack while creating internal politics for the team”.
Aside from the technical complexities, some within Amazon are said to have raised questions about charging for Alexa Plus, noting that Amazon subscribers who already pay for services like Amazon Music may not want to pay extra for the upgraded voice assistant.
Amazon recently launched a range of new generative AI apps for Alexa, including a chatbot from Character.ai, which lets you have conversations with different characters and personas, and Splash Music, which lets you create your music tracks using voice assistant.