Amazon is Working on a Paid AI Version of Alexa

According to a report in Business Insider, Amazon is working on a paid subscription plan for an AI-improved version of Alexa. The report cites multiple sources.

This new service is provisionally called “Alexa Plus” and the team working on it has a June 30 launch deadline. That said, progress appears to have slowed, with Amazon unhappy with the quality so far. And because fixing the quality issues requires “a major overhaul of Alexa’s technology stack,” that could delay the offering past mid-year. The current version of Alexa is apparently being called “Classic Alexa” internally now.

According to the publication, Alexa Plus will be more conversational than the free Alexa and will be personalized using AI. The service has been in a limited preview with 15,000 external customers, and the feedback is mixed, with Alexa Plus delivering on its conversational and informative promises but deflecting answers or providing unnecessarily long or inaccurate responses. It also seems to have trouble understanding handling queries with multiple tasks, like turning on lights and music at the same time.

Amazon almost certainly previewed this service when it announced future generative AI Alexa functionality at its September 2023 event. At the time, the firm noted that Alexa would receive “a suite of conversational AI capabilities,” more personalization, and contextual awareness via an Alexa large language model (LLM). (Business Insider notes an Amazon LLM called Olympus, and I assume these are one and the same.)

“There is tension over whether people will pay for Alexa or not,” one source told Business Insider, alluding to internal debates about whether the company should charge for these features at all.

Separately, Amazon has also invested billions of dollars in OpenAI competitor Anthropic, and it launched an AI chatbot for businesses in November.