Amazon is making a massive upgrade to its smart assistant Alexa, striving to make it a smarter, more actionable assistant rather than a simple information provider. Amazon CEO Andy Jesse revealed the news in a recent earnings call and said that Alexa will have more powerful capabilities in the future and can perform various tasks. The editor of Downcodes will explain in detail Amazon’s plan to improve Alexa and the challenges behind it.
During a recent third-quarter earnings call, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy revealed that the company is making major improvements to its smart assistant Alexa. He said that Alexa in the future will become a more "intelligent" assistant that can not only answer questions and summarize information, but also take actions on behalf of users.
Jesse noted that the next generation of smart assistants and generative AI applications will be more capable of performing a variety of tasks rather than just providing information. "You can imagine our Alexa is going to be really good at this," he said.
To achieve this goal, Amazon is re-architecting Alexa's "brain" and plans to launch a series of new base models that will be announced in the near future. Amazon first announced that it would transform Alexa as early as 2023, and planned to introduce generative artificial intelligence technology into the assistant function.
It is understood that Amazon has encountered some technical challenges in the reconstruction process of Alexa. The company currently plans to replace the original Alexa model with the model of the invested startup Anthropic. There are reports that in the improved version, Alexa faced slow response issues when turning on smart lights, and even took six seconds to respond to user requests.
The new Alexa, internally codenamed "Remarkable Alexa," is expected to offer a paid plan of $5 to $10 per month, as well as a less powerful free plan. While reports suggested the assistant would launch in October, it appears to have encountered some delays, with the launch expected to be pushed back to 2025.
Although Alexa is used in more than 500 million devices worldwide, its contribution to Amazon's profits is minimal. Amazon has lost tens of billions of dollars in its device business since 2017, putting pressure on the company's financial health.
Amazon’s plan to improve Alexa shows its ambitions in the field of AI, but it also faces huge challenges in technology and market competition. Whether Alexa can successfully transform in the future will have a profound impact on Amazon's overall strategy. Let’s wait and see the official debut of “Remarkable Alexa”.