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Amazon unveiled a long-delayed “conversational” version of Alexa on Wednesday, betting a more personalised artificial intelligence-powered chatbot will give it an edge in the digital assistant market.
Amazon said its so-called Alexa+ service would enable customers to engage with their voice assistants in “natural, flowing conversations”. It said the upgrade meant services would become more personalised as the device learnt users’ habits and daily schedules.
“The new Alexa knows almost every instrument in your life,” Panos Panay, Amazon’s device chief, said at an event in New York. He said it would also help organise customers’ schedules and control a range of smart home devices.
Services will be offered for $19.99 a month, or free alongside Amazon’s $14.99 Prime subscription, with Alexa+ a loss leader intended to boost demand for Prime accounts.
The new Alexa is Amazon’s attempt to catch up with rivals including Google, Meta and Microsoft on embedding generative AI into products and services to help boost revenues.
The ecommerce giant has increased revenue by offering AI data centre services and products to enterprise customers through its cloud computing unit Amazon Web Services, and has made an $8bn strategic bet on start-up Anthropic to compete against the likes of Microsoft-backed OpenAI on more advanced AI models. But it has lagged behind in consumer-facing products.
The company has committed to $100bn in capital expenditures this year, with an emphasis on AI infrastructure.
Alexa+ was touted more than a year and a half ago and was announced after OpenAI launched its ChatGPT model in 2022.
Yet development has been beset with difficulties, with the company’s AI and Alexa teams encountering slow response times and “hallucinations” or fabricated answers.
The new service runs on a range of large language models including Anthropic’s Claude and the ecommerce group’s in-house Nova service, depending on the task a customer sets. Amazon is also launching an Alexa website and new mobile app.
Wednesday’s announcement came more than a decade after the first iteration of Amazon’s digital assistant was released on its Echo device. The company has since sold more than 500mn Alexa-enabled devices, but it has not publicly disclosed whether the unit has made a profit despite sinking tens of billions of dollars into its range of smart devices and speakers.
Amazon executives demonstrated the upgraded Alexa making restaurant reservations, booking a repair person and ordering an Uber ride for an airport pick up. It also showed it booking concert tickets and setting price alerts.
They also showed Alexa processing information from uploaded documents and photographs, and highlighted the assistant’s new ability to complete tasks for customers.
Panay said the current version of Alexa still had some limitations and users would sometimes hear the response “sorry, I didn’t quite get that”.
“Alexa has a legacy of 10 years of trust and transparency with our customers — and those years will continue with Alexa+,” he added.
