Amazon is reportedly working on a paid subscription plan to use its Alexa voice assistant. This would be a version boosted with artificial intelligence. However, Amazon would encounter some technical inconveniences.
Amazon, like all major digital companies, must work around artificial intelligence. After an internal reorganization, it unveiled a new version of Alexa, its voice assistant. The idea: to be able to talk to him as if you were chatting with ChatGPT. It should arrive later this year, but via a paid subscription. Except that Amazon would encounter some setbacks.
Alexa Plus: Amazon’s subscription for its AI would be delayed
It’s the media Business Insider which reveals several things about what is provisionally named ” Alexa Plus », after having been able to consult internal documents. The objective with this subscription would be to provide a version of Alexa with artificial intelligence, thanks to a technology called “ Remarkable Alexa “. Several people from Amazon reportedly indicated to Business Insiderthat the launch would be scheduled for June 30 and that the technology was being tested with 15,000 external customers.
The need to have a paid subscription also stems from the fact that running a more sophisticated version of Alexa requires more computing power and ultimately costs more. The technology is different than the original Alexa, using a structure more centralized on language understanding and response generation, rather than context.
The concern is that the quality of the responses would not meet the expectations of the engineers. Alexa would give false information. This is why Amazon is reportedly in the process of fundamentally reworking its technology. Business Insider states that Remarkable Alexa should “improve its ability to respond to ambiguous customer requests that require the engagement of multiple services, such as turning on the lights and music at the same time.» Beyond technical problems, there would also be relational problems within Amazon. The teams behind the first Alexa would like to protect their work, while some people would question the idea of charging to use Alexa.
Why Amazon has no choice but to make Alexa profitable
What also remindsBusiness Insider, is that this may be Alexa’s last chance. Since its launch, Amazon’s voice assistant has not been profitable and its economic model is still poorly defined. In November 2022, we learned that the layoff of 10,000 employees at Amazon also concerned teams responsible for developing Alexa.
There are Echo speakers, but they are sold at a loss and it is not the voice commands on Amazon or the skills of Alexa (enabling partnerships with other companies) that have made the assistant profitable. voice.
This is where Alexa Plus comes in. The challenge is high: making Alexa profitable in general, thanks to a paid subscription. But there is a second: to do better than the competition, namely Google Assistant or Siri. For its part, Google is working on Assistant with Bard, powered by Gemini, its in-house LLM. As for Apple, several rumors indicate that the company is working on a redesign of Siri. In terms of users,InsiderIntelligenceindicates that Alexa is the third most used voice assistant in the United States, at least 9 million users behind Siri and Google Assistant.