Amazon aims to launch an AI Alexa in October, with a subscription ...
The revamp of the voice assistant, which documents say will include a daily AI-generated news summary, would come just weeks before the U.S. presidential election. Amazon is preparing to launch its delayed overhaul of personal voice assistant Alexa in October, according to internal documents obtained by The Washington Post, as it faces new competition from artificial intelligence voice assistants from rivals.
Access to the upgraded version of the assistant will require a paid subscription, the documents said. The release, scheduled to occur just weeks before the presidential election, will include a new “Smart Briefing” feature that provides daily, AI-generated summaries of news articles selected based on a customer’s preferences, the documents said.
Challenges with Political News
Alexa has previously struggled to accurately answer questions about political news events, such as who won the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Rival tech companies, including Microsoft and Google, have programmed their own AI chatbots Copilot and Gemini to decline to answer questions about politics, in light of concerns about misinformation in a year of consequential global elections.
But Amazon documents said that “AI features that help customers curate, summarize, and explore current events was also rated as one of the top customer requests.” News summaries can create a daily habit and drive “recurrent engagement,” according to the internal communications, used to track progress ahead of product launches.
Subscription Details
A subscription to the new assistant could cost as much as $10 a month, the documents said, but the original version, referred to as “classic Alexa,” will remain free to use. Amazon management is planning to make decisions on pricing, subscription structure and the product name this month, according to documents obtained by The Post.
New Features
Other features of the new Alexa, sometimes referred to as Remarkable Alexa or Project Banyan in the documents, include help finding recipes and a chatbot aimed at children. The documents also describe new conversational shopping tools, which if they boost e-commerce sales could, along with subscription fees, help Amazon recoup some of its investment into Alexa.
Market Competition and Launch
Amazon first announced that Alexa would get a major AI overhaul in September 2023. The project was seen as Amazon’s response to the emergence of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which prompted leading tech companies to invest more heavily in AI. An internal Amazon document from earlier this year obtained by The Post said the revamped assistant was due to launch in September 2024.
The mid-October launch described in the new internal documents would mean it took Amazon more than a year to bring the project to fruition, slower than other major tech companies have launched some major AI projects since the debut of ChatGPT.
Enhanced Conversational Experience
The new Amazon Alexa is supposed to feel more conversational and charismatic, according to the documents. They describe how the assistant will learn to recognize the individual voices of new customers and ask people questions about themselves so as to be more helpful later.
Improved Shopping Experience
The new AI Alexa will also help customers with other daily tasks, like finding recipes. “Food assistance was ranked one of the top 3 areas where customers want more help from AI enabled assistance,” according to the documents.
Child-Friendly Features
Amazon also hopes AI Alexa will prove compelling to children. An experience called Explore with Alexa 2.0 will allow verified children to “have back-and-forth, exploratory conversations with Alexa about any topic under the sun,” the documents said. The children’s experience will be “safe and moderated,” the documents said, and in compliance with regulations.
