Amazon on Wednesday unveiled the first major overhaul of its Alexa voice assistant since its introduction more than a decade ago, embedding it with generative artificial intelligence. The effort carries significant weight at Amazon, which has plowed billions of dollars into Alexa since its launch in 2014 in the hope of putting the service into a range of devices and ultimately driving sales on its main e-commerce website. “Alexa knows almost every instrument in your life, your schedule, yo
le, your smart home, your preferences, the devices you’re using, the people you’re connected to, the entertainment you love and uses many of the apps you use, a lot of the services you need,” said Panos Panay, Amazon’s head of devices and services, at a launch event in New York.
The new service is called Alexa+, Panay said, echoing the nomenclature of the higher tier of many tech and streaming service offerings.
Alexa+ is free for Amazon Prime members and is priced at US$19.99 a month for non-Prime users. The service will be available in March to some users, with the rollout expanding to more people over time. Amazon had considered pricing the service at US$5 or US$10 per month for all users with no Prime tie-in.
Panay demonstrated how Alexa can store, through prompts, customer preferences — for example, that a household member is vegetarian and prefers Greek and Italian food but eschews peanut butter. It can be used to make dinner reservations and send timed texts or reminders.
The service can connect to Amazon products such as Ring doorbells to show recordings from its cameras.
Alexa director Mara Segal said Alexa can review documents such as a homeowners association contract so that a resident knows what is allowed, like installing solar panels.
Amazon shares rose 1.7 per cent to US$216.45.
Competition from Apple, Google
The event marked the unveiling of a secret project known internally as “Banyan” aimed at making Alexa more conversational. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can learn from data and improve over time.
Following the company’s presentation, Amazon executives presented different capabilities of the service like using it for food ordering, smart home connections and video streaming. But it did not permit media to test the service themselves.
Some who worked on the service had told Reuters that it occasionally provided incorrect answers to user questions or lagged for several seconds before completing a prompt. During the demonstration, Wednesday, Panay and other executives had to ask more than once on a few occasions to have the Alexa service respond.
While Amazon’s Alexa was launched three years after Apple’s Siri hit the iPhone maker’s devices, Alexa helped make the use of voice assistants more mainstream. Still, the lack of solid improvements and overhauls to Alexa over the years meant an erosion in consumer usage of the service, especially in the age of AI.
Apple has already incorporated its suite of AI features, dubbed Apple Intelligence, into its Siri voice assistant, while Google has revamped its voice assistant using its AI chatbot Gemini.
Alexa is voice-controlled software installed in products such as smart speakers that can provide answers to user questions, play music, set timers and serve as a hub for home automation, by linking internet-connected devices so that, for instance, a light can be turned on with just voice prompts.
The new Alexa AI service will be able to respond to multiple prompts in sequence and even act as an “agent” by taking actions for users without their direct involvement. That contrasts with the current iteration which generally handles only a single request at a time.
Amazon has said there are some 500 million Alexa-capable devices in consumer hands already, meaning the revamp is at once a huge money-making opportunity for the Seattle retailer – and a big financial risk if it does not live up to expectations.
Amazon said Alexa+ will use the best AI model available for a given task using Bedrock, Amazon’s grab bag of AI services to allow for experimentation.
But Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Echo, acknowledged AI startup Anthropic’s contribution to building Alexa+, confirming a Reuters story that Anthropic’s Claude was an underpinning of the service.
Amazon has invested US$8 billion in Anthropic.
(Reporting by Greg Bensinger; Additional reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Christopher Cushing, Rod Nickel, Alexandra Hudson).
Further reading: How conversational commerce is redefining the way customers interact with brands