On Wednesday, Amazon announced its first major overhaul of the Alexa Voice Assistant since it was introduced more than a decade ago, embedding generative artificial intelligence.
This initiative has a considerable amount of weight on Amazon. Since its launch in 2014, Amazon has been garnering billions of dollars for Alexa, bringing its services to a variety of devices, and ultimately promoting sales on its main e-commerce website.
“Alexa is a lot of the instruments of almost every life, your schedule, your smart home, your preferences, the devices you use, the people you connect to, and many of the many apps you love At a launch event held in New York, Panos Panay, head of devices and services at Amazon, said:
Panay said the new service is called Alexa+.
Alexa+ is free for Amazon Prime members and costs $19.99 per month for non-prime users. The service, which was live as of Wednesday, will be available to some users in March, and the rollout will expand to more people over time.
Panay demonstrated how Alexa can store through prompts through customer preferences. For example, household members were vegetarians and showed that they preferred Greek and Italian cuisine, but avoided peanut butter. It can be used to make a dinner reservation and send timed text or reminders.
The service allows you to connect to Amazon products such as ring doorbells and view recordings from the camera.
Alexa Director Mara Segal said that residents know that they are allowed, including installing solar panels, because Alexa can see documents such as homeowners association agreements.
Amazon's stock rose approximately 2% to $217.02.
Apple competes with Google
The event marked the announcement of a secret project known internally as “Banyan” aimed at making Alexa more conversational.
Generated AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can learn from data and improve over time.
Amazon's Alexa was launched three years after Apple's Siri hit iPhone maker devices, but Alexa helped make the use of voice assistants more mainstream. Still, the long-standing improvements and lack of overhauls to Alexa meant erosion of consumer use of services, especially at the age of AI.
While Apple already incorporates a suite of AI features called Apple Intelligence into its Siri Voice Assistant, Google has revamped its voice assistant using the AI chatbot Gemini.
Alexa links devices connected to the internet to create products such as smart speakers that act as hubs for home automation, such as answering user questions, playing music, set timers, and home automation, by using lights to tint. Installed voice control software. It will be turned on with just a voice prompt.
The new Alexa AI service can even act as an “agent” by responding to multiple prompts in order and performing user actions without direct involvement.
This is in contrast to the current iteration, which generally only handles a single request at a time.
Executives are arguing that they will charge $10 a month for the new services, people told Reuters to collect some of their investments in businesses that lose money.
Amazon didn't address the price details right away.
Amazon says there are already 505 million Alexa-enabled devices in the hands of consumers. In other words, improvements are an opportunity for Seattle retailers to make a lot of money at once, and if they don't meet expectations, they're a big financial risk.
Alexa and Echo vice president Daniel Rausch acknowledged AI startup human contributions to Alexa+, confirming Reuters' story that humanity's Claude is the main foundation of service.
