Amazon has unveiled the primary main overhaul of its Alexa voice assistant since its introduction greater than a decade in the past, embedding it with generative synthetic intelligence.
The hassle carries vital weight at Amazon, which has ploughed billions of {dollars} into Alexa since its launch in 2014 within the hope of placing the service into a variety of units and in the end driving gross sales on its fundamental e-commerce web site.
“Alexa is aware of virtually each instrument in your life, your schedule, your sensible residence, your preferences, the units you’re utilizing, the individuals you’re related to, the leisure you like and makes use of most of the apps you utilize, quite a lot of the providers you want,” mentioned Panos Panay, Amazon’s head of units and providers, at a launch occasion in New York.
The brand new service is named Alexa+, Panay mentioned, echoing the nomenclature of the upper tier of many tech and streaming service choices.
Alexa+ is free for Amazon Prime members and is priced at US$19.99/month for non-Prime customers. The service shall be accessible in March to some customers, with the roll-out increasing to extra individuals over time. Amazon had thought-about pricing the service at $5 or $10 per thirty days for all customers with no Prime tie-in.
Panay demonstrated how Alexa can retailer, by prompts, buyer preferences — for instance, {that a} family member is vegetarian and prefers Greek and Italian meals however eschews peanut butter. It may be used to make dinner reservations and ship timed texts or reminders.
‘Banyan’
The service can connect with Amazon merchandise similar to Ring doorbells to indicate recordings from its cameras.
Alexa director Mara Segal mentioned Alexa can assessment paperwork similar to a householders affiliation contract so {that a} resident is aware of what’s allowed, like putting in photo voltaic panels.
Amazon shares rose 1.7% to $216.45.
The occasion marked the revealing of a secret mission identified internally as “Banyan” geared toward making Alexa extra conversational. Generative AI is a kind of synthetic intelligence that may be taught from information and enhance over time.
Learn: Panos Panay to move Amazon’s units enterprise
Following the corporate’s presentation, Amazon executives offered totally different capabilities of the service like utilizing it for meals ordering, sensible residence connections and video streaming. However it didn’t allow media to check the service themselves.
Some who labored on the service mentioned it often supplied incorrect solutions to person questions or lagged for a number of seconds earlier than finishing a immediate. In the course of the demonstration on Wednesday, Panay and different executives needed to ask greater than as soon as on a number of events to have the Alexa service reply.
Whereas Amazon’s Alexa was launched three years after Apple’s Siri hit the iPhone maker’s units, Alexa helped make the usage of voice assistants extra mainstream. Nonetheless, the shortage of strong enhancements and overhauls to Alexa over time meant an erosion in client utilization of the service, particularly within the age of AI.
Apple has already integrated its suite of AI options, dubbed Apple Intelligence, into its Siri voice assistant, whereas Google has revamped its voice assistant utilizing its AI chatbot Gemini.
Alexa is voice-controlled software program put in in merchandise similar to sensible audio system that may present solutions to person questions, play music, set timers and function a hub for residence automation by linking internet-connected units in order that, as an illustration, a light-weight might be turned on with simply voice prompts.
The brand new Alexa AI service will be capable to reply to a number of prompts in sequence and even act as an “agent” by taking actions for customers with out their direct involvement. That contrasts with the present iteration which typically handles solely a single request at a time.
Amazon has mentioned there are some 500 million Alexa-capable units in client palms already, which means the revamp is without delay an enormous money-making alternative for the Seattle retailer — and an enormous monetary danger if it doesn’t dwell as much as expectations.
Amazon mentioned Alexa+ will use one of the best AI mannequin accessible for a given process utilizing Bedrock, Amazon’s seize bag of AI providers to permit for experimentation.
Learn: Anthropic’s Claude to energy Amazon’s large Alexa AI revamp
However Daniel Rausch, vice chairman of Alexa and Echo, acknowledged AI start-up Anthropic’s contribution to constructing Alexa+, confirming a Reuters story that Anthropic’s Claude was an underpinning of the service. Amazon has invested $8-billion in Anthropic. — Greg Bensinger, with Deborah Sophia, (c) 2025 Reuters
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