Amazon Plans To Revamp Alexa With AI And A Monthly Subscription

Date: May 23, 2024

Amazon plans to upgrade Alexa, its flagship voice assistance technology, with artificial intelligence capabilities. Alexa has been deployed for over ten years.

Around 10 years ago, Amazon released a product that made its global user base feel how life could be with a smart virtual assistant beside them. However, over the years, it has not brought enough innovations to keep up with the evolving consumer expectations. Amazon Alexa was launched 10 years ago as Amazon’s flagship voice assistant that could perform multiple tasks for users’ voice prompts. While it remained a highly utilized technology till 2020, the boom of generative AI capabilities inevitably lost its market share.

According to people with internal knowledge, the Seattle-based tech giant has recognized where its once-attractive product is lacking and plans to revamp it using AI. This move will bring Alexa closer to being the voice assistant that global consumers expect, owing to the AI voice chat assistants its rivals have launched recently. Microsoft-backed OpenAI has launched ChatGPT-4o, which not only allows seamless conversational AI voice assistance but also makes it quite human-like.

Amazon’s Alexa has always felt like a robotic voice without any expressions, emotions, or cognitive recognition. While Amazon’s rivals have introduced their better versions just recently, it almost feels like Amazon is being left behind in the race. To catch up, the tech giant has invested $4 Billion in Anthropic, whose Claude chatbot competes with ChatGPT. Amazon will reportedly be using the Titan Large Language Model for the Alexa upgrade. 

Did Alexa enter the market too early? Perhaps. But its popularity among users and widespread adoption for various IoT devices cannot be denied. Alexa's success as the leading voice assistant led to the launch of dedicated Amazon Alexa devices at various price points, offering enhanced connectivity, range, and remote accessibility functions. The only missing piece in this puzzle was AI, a technology that was not available for the majority of Alexa's existence. 

Investors are still skeptical about Amazon's potential market share acquisition. OpenAI’s GPT-4o has the early mover advantage, posing a risk not only to Alexa but also to multiple Amazon Web Services.