unveiled on Wednesday the first major overhaul of its Alexa voice assistant since it was introduced more than a decade ago, embedding it with generative artificial intelligence.
The effort carries significant weight at Amazon, which has plowed billions of dollars into Alexa since its launch in 2014 in the hope of putting the service into a range of devices and ultimately driving sales on its main e-commerce website.
"Alexa knows almost every instrument in your life, your schedule, your smart home, your preferences, the devices you're using, the people you're connected to, the entertainment you love and uses many of the apps you use, a lot of the services you need," said Panos Panay, Amazon's head of devices and services, at a launch event in New York.
The new service is called Alexa+, Panay said, echoing the nomenclature of the higher tier of many tech and streaming service offerings.
Alexa+ is free for Amazon Prime members and is priced at $19.99 a month for non-Prime users. The service, which was live as of Wednesday, will be available in March to some users, with the rollout expanding to more people over time.
Panay demonstrated how Alexa can store, through prompts, customer preferences - for example, that a household member is vegetarian and prefers Greek and Italian food but eschews peanut butter. It can be used to make dinner reservations and send timed texts or reminders.
The service can connect to Amazon products such as Ring doorbells to show recordings from its cameras.
Alexa director Mara Segal said Alexa can review documents such as a homeowners association contract so that a resident knows what is allowed, like installing solar panels.
Amazon shares rose about 2% to $217.02.
COMPETITION FROM APPLE, GOOGLE
The event marked the unveiling of a secret project known internally as "Banyan" aimed at making Alexa more conversational. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can learn from data and improve over time.
While Amazon's Alexa was launched three years after Apple's Siri hit the iPhone maker's devices, Alexa helped make the use of voice assistants more mainstream. Still, the lack of solid improvements and overhauls to Alexa over the years meant an erosion in consumer usage of the service, especially in the age of AI.
Apple (AAPL.O), opens a new tab that has already incorporated its suite of AI features, dubbed Apple Intelligence, into its Siri voice assistant, while Google (GOOGL.O), opens a new tab that has revamped its voice assistant using its AI chatbot Gemini.
Alexa is voice-controlled software installed in products such as smart speakers that can provide answers to user questions, play music, set timers, and serve as a hub for home automation, by linking internet-connected devices so that, for instance, a light can be turned on with just voice prompts.
The new Alexa AI service will be able to respond to multiple prompts in sequence and even act as an "agent" by taking actions for users without their direct involvement. That contrasts with the current iteration which generally handles only a single request at a time.
Executives have debated charging as much as $10 per month for the new service, people have told Reuters, to recoup some of the investment sunk into the money-losing business. Amazon did not immediately address pricing details.
Amazon has said there are some 500 million Alexa-capable devices in consumer's hands already, meaning the revamp is at once a huge money-making opportunity for the Seattle retailer - and a big financial risk if it does not live up to expectations.
Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Echo, acknowledged AI startup Anthropic's contribution to building Alexa+, confirming a Reuters story that Anthropic's Claude was a major underpinning of the service.
On Tuesday, top executives from Amazon took the stage at Spring Studios in New York City to share updates on the company’s devices and services. Unsurprisingly, those updates centered around artificial intelligence and all the ways that Amazon is integrating generative AI into Alexa and its Alexa-enabled smart devices.
No new devices were announced at the event, but Amazon did give us a deep dive into Alexa+, which looks like the company’s answer to ChatGPT and Gemini.
Alexa+ brings AI to Amazon’s assistant
Amazon’s new Devices & Services Senior Vice President Panos Panay took the stage to show off Alexa+, an upgraded version of the company’s virtual assistant, now powered by generative AI. Some of the ways Alexa+ improves upon Alexa include its ability to understand context and meaning, its ability to act on your behalf to plan events or book travel, and the fact that it starts becoming more personalized the more you interact with it.
Alexa+ will continue to be available on all of your Echo devices and the Alexa mobile app, but it will also be accessible via a new web browser experience.
How Alexa+ transforms your smart home
To demonstrate Alexa+’s new abilities, Amazon unveiled a redesigned user interface on the Echo Show. The UI includes an adaptive display that automatically transitions from your photos and personalized content to a customized home screen as you approach.
Beyond the UI, Alexa+ enables new functionality on all of Amazon’s Alexa-enabled devices. For example, you can set up complex new Routines by voice, ask Alexa+ to play the latest trending pop song, tell the assistant to move music to different rooms in your house, and request to jump to specific scenes in shows and movies. You can also use Alexa+ and your Ring subscription to get a summary of what’s been happening around your house.
Alexa+ integrates with your Ring subscription. Image source: Amazon
Here are a few more features coming to your smart devices courtesy of Alexa+:
You can share documents with Alexa+ to let it extract and recall relevant information that it can use to provide summaries and add events to your calendar.
“Stories with Alexa” and “Explore with Alexa” are coming to Amazon Kids+.
By connecting to hundreds of APIs, Alexa+ can coordinate multiple services, letting it make a reservation, call an Uber, and text your contacts about your plans all at once.
Alexa+ will also soon give customers the ability to “conversationally create and edit grocery lists on the fly, revise a list based on dietary preferences, and add ingredients to an Amazon Fresh order.” These features will integrate with Whole Foods, Grubhub, and more.
Pricing and launch details
Prime members will have access to Alexa+ for free, but everyone else will have to pay $19.99 a month to use the AI-powered version of Amazon’s virtual assistant.
Amazon says that Alexa+ will start rolling out in the U.S. in the next few weeks. The upgrade will come in waves, but households with Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 smart displays will be among the first to get early access to the new assistant.
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