Amazon Launches New Alexa Voice Assistant With AI Facelift

Amazon on Wednesday launched the first major overhaul of its Alexa voice assistant in more than a decade, infusing it with benevolent artificial intelligence. The initiative is significant at Amazon, which has spent billions of dollars on Alexa in an effort to get the service on multiple devices and eventually drive sales to its main e-commerce platform in 2014.

“Alexa will connect to almost every device in your life, your calendar, your smart home, your favorites, the devices you use, the people you’re connected with, the movies and music you watch and the music and a lot of the apps you use, a lot of the services, everything you want,” said Panay, Amazon devices and services boss. The new service is Alexa+, Panay said, emulating the high-end naming of so many streaming service and technology products. Alexa+ costs nothing for Amazon Prime members and $19.99 per month for non-Prime users. The service, which goes live Wednesday, will roll out to some users in March, with availability expanding to more users over time.

Pen demonstrated how Alexa will be able to store, in the form of queries, information about customers’ tastes — for example, that a family member is a vegetarian and likes Greek and Italian food but dislikes peanut butter. It will also be able to make dinner reservations and send timed messages or reminders. The service will also be able to pair with Amazon devices such as the Ring doorbell to show recordings from its cameras. Mara Segal, Alexa’s founder, said Alexa could review contracts such as a homeowners association agreement so a homeowner knows what’s allowed, such as putting solar panels on their home. Amazon stock rose nearly 2% to $217.02.

Competition from Apple, Google

The event also saw the launch of a secret project code-named “Banyan” inside the company, which focused on making Alexa more conversational. Generative AI is a form of artificial intelligence that is able to learn from data and get better over time. While Alexa from Amazon was introduced three years after Alexa reached the iPhone maker’s products, Alexa made voice assistants more mainstream in usage. However, not having decent improvements and overhauls to Alexa over the years led to a decline in user consumption of the service, especially in the age of AI.

Apple has already embedded its suite of AI features within its Siri voice assistant, Google has revolutionized its voice assistant using its AI chatbot Genii. Alexa is voice-activated software in devices such as smart speakers that can provide answers to questions asked by users, play music, set timers and serve as a home automation center, connecting Internet-connected devices so that, for example, a light can be turned on with a mere voice command.

Alexa’s new AI offering will be able to respond to multiple requests in succession and even act as an “agent” by performing tasks on users’ behalf without intervention. This is in contrast to the current version that typically responds to one request at a time. Executives have debated whether to charge as much as $10 a month for the new service, people told Reuters, so as not to invest some money in a money-losing business. Amazon would not immediately comment on pricing details.

Amazon has reported that there are already 500 million Alexa devices in the hands of customers, so the revamp is a massive money-making proposition for the Seattle retailer—along with massive financial risk if it doesn’t pay off. Alexa and Echo vice president Daniel Rauch confirmed a story from Anthropic that AI company Anthropic helped build Alexa+, pointing out that Anthropic’s cloud was one of the main pillars of the service.

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