Amazon's AI Upgrade for Alexa Could Cost You: Report

By Jose Antonio Lanz

Amazon's much-anticipated AI upgrade for Alexa is set to hit the market this 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 roll out a subscription-based version of its voice assistant, packed with new AI-driven 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 newspaper reported. But don't panic—the "classic" free version isn't going anywhere.

The Washington Post says the new AI-powered Alexa promises more human-like conversations. It'll recognize individual voices, ask personal questions, and use that info to tailor its responses. For example, Alexa may come up with better suggestions for a weekend activity based on your past chats, so it won’t recommend hikes to people who hate going out on excursions.

The report also previews 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 engaged with Alexa and derive some profit out of the previously unprofitable home assistant.

For shopping addicts, the upgraded Alexa will answer detailed product questions, hunt down deals, and even ping users when their desired item goes on sale, the Post noted. Amazon's betting big that these features will drive both subscriptions and overall sales.

This AI overhaul has been in the works for over a year, a response to the ChatGPT revolution that sent tech companies scrambling to up their AI game. In September 2023, Decrypt reported that Amazon started working on an advanced LLM that would power its suite of Alexa hardware.

“To our knowledge, this is the largest integration of an LLM, real-time services, and a suite 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’re also able to enhance a number of core components of the Alexa experience.”

The efforts in a new proprietary language model came after a partnership between Amazon and Anthropic (developers of Claude AI) was revealed. Amazon started training its LLM on a huge 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 an experience to customers that's accurate and personalized and constantly getting better,” An Amazon spokesperson told Decrypt, “But in tandem, we give customers control over whether their Alexa voice recordings are used to improve the service, and we always honor our customer preferences when we train our models.”

In November 2023, Amazon launched Q, an AI-powered assistant for business applications. This release marked Amazon's entry into the enterprise AI assistant market, competing directly with established offerings like ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot.

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