Amazon has announced the long-awaited new version of its digital assistant, Alexa.
The latest service called Alexa+ is powered by generative artificial intelligence and will charge users a monthly subscription fee to access it.
This will be the first time Amazon will charge users to access Alexa services beyond purchasing the speaker system or tablet devices, but Alexa+ is expected to work on “almost every” Alexa device the company has shipped.
Set to roll out in early March, the new subscription will cost users US$19.99 a month, or be free for Amazon Prime members.
Alexa+ will be able to do things like purchase concert tickets, order groceries, book dinner reservations among other tasks.
“She’ll learn the rhythm of your life and proactively take action with you,” said Panos Panay, the company’s senior vice president of devices and services.
The model will also be able to read study guides, then quiz users on the answers, and organise handwritten documents and recall information.
“Every once in a while, a technology comes around and it changes everything,” said Panay.
”[Large language models] enter the stage and fundamentally change the way we think about AI. ... It’s shaken up everything,” he said.
Alexa+ will use a “broad range of state-of-the-art” training models from several providers, including Amazon’s Nova as well as third parties like Amazon-backed AI startup Anthropic.
“We have been using AI expansively for over 25 years. And the way we think about AI and technology in general at Amazon is that we don't use the technology because we think it's cool or interesting… but we use it to solve real customer problems,” said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
He added that the company believes that "virtually every customer experience that we all know of will be reinvented using generative AI. And altogether new experiences that we only dreamed of before are going to be possible.”
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