Amazon’s devices and services Panos Panay will speak at the Amazon Devices Launch event held in New York City, USA on February 26th, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Amazon On Wednesday, we announce the much-anticipated overhaul of Alexa Digital Assistant and charge a monthly subscription fee to access it.
The improved service Amazon calls “Alexa+” is powered by artificial intelligence that generates Panos Panay, the senior vice president of devices and services.
Amazon will bill users for the first time and access the improved Alexa+. The service will be rolled out in Early Access next month, for $19.99 a month or free for Amazon Prime members.
“Sometimes technology comes in and it changes everything,” Panay said. “It’s going to be on the (large language model) stage and fundamentally changing the way you think about AI…it shakes everything.”
Alexa+ can purchase concert tickets, order groceries, book dinner reservations, and offer recipe suggestions tailored to specific people in your home. You can also read the survey guide and then quizzify users about answers, organize handwritten documents, and recall information from them.
“She learns the rhythm of your life and takes a positive action with you,” Panay said.
Alexa+ will work on “almost every” Alexa device shipped by the company, Panay said. All of Amazon’s Alexa+ demonstrations were on the echo show, but it’s a touchscreen voice controlled display.
The deployment of Alexa+ will begin with the Echo Show device, Ann Wessing, Amazon’s global general manager and product marketing director for Alexa and Echo, said in a demonstration following the event. She added that “Best Alexa+ Experience” is on touchscreen echo devices.
Daniel Rausch, vice president of Amazon’s Alexa and Fire TV, said on the stage that Alexa has undergone a “complete reorganization” as part of the upgrade.
“It’s not as easy as collecting LLM and jacking it into the original Alexa,” Rausch said.
Alexa+ uses a “wide, cutting-edge” training model from several providers, Rausch said. This includes Amazon’s own set of NOVA models and sets created by third parties, such as the Amazon-backed AI startup Humanity.
Alexa and Echo vice president Daniel Rausch will speak at the Amazon Devices Launch event held in New York City, USA on February 26, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
The company has faced growing pressure to upgrade Alexa since Openai released ChatGPT in late 2022, shocking users with its ability to perform complex functions such as fiction writing and coding software. Ta. Suddenly, Alexa and the other voice assistants began to look outdated, urging Amazon to consider improvements.
“They know that they need to get this right. If they do that right, we don’t talk much about Openai vs. humanity and Alexa vs. ChatGpt,” Maxim Group said. said Tom Forte, senior consumer internet analyst.
Jitesh Ubrani, research manager overseeing IDC wearables and other devices, said Alexa subscription fees will help Amazon offset the high costs of AI development and make digital assistants a more profitable business. It may be helpful. CNBC reported last May that it was considering charging a monthly subscription fee for Alexa as part of its push to make money from its services.
“Looking at every generative AI system, they all have very high development costs,” Ubulani said.
Ubrani said Amazon needs to step carefully on paid Alexa services to avoid alienating prime subscribers who already pay $139 a year for their loyalty membership.
The company must also show users “what this new Alexa can do” to justify their subscription, he added. Openai offers a free version of ChatGpt and a premium subscription of $20 per month. The paid version of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot costs $20 a month.
“Their audience is already so large, even moving some of those users into subscriptions could result in a significant amount of money,” Ubulani said.
Released in 2014, Alexa was a passion project by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He thought that one day it could be similar to all computers like “Star Trek.” Amazon has established an early lead in voice software, with over 500 million Alexa devices on sale worldwide, the company said in 2023.
But Alexa wasn’t as transformative as Bezos wanted. According to a research by Forrester, most consumers use digital assistants for “very simple tasks” to check the weather, play music, or use them primarily via smartphones rather than smart speakers. I will.
Alexa remains unprofitable. Amazon has never charged access to Alexa and instead injects it into its lineup of smart speakers, tablets and other devices. The company hoped that Alexa’s interactions would direct consumers to spend money on other products and services, but that didn’t happen.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy will speak at the Amazon Devices Launch event held in New York City, USA on February 26, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Amazon has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in its device business, including Echo, Kindle, Fire TV and other products, the Wall Street Journal reported last July.
After the launch of ChatGpt, Amazon began working on overhauling Alexa with its generator AI technology to make it more conversational and convenient. The company demonstrated soup-splitting Alexa in 2023, but it didn’t release a new version of Alexa, called “Let’s Chat” to the public.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has scrutinized or, in some cases, discontinued some of the company’s more unproven or financial projects. This includes devices and service units that house Alexa. The unit received two rounds of layoffs in 2022 and 2023 as more than 27,000 Amazon employees were let go as part of a company-wide job cut.
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