Amazon is preparing to launch its delayed overhaul of personal voice assistant Alexa in October, according to internal documents obtained by The Washington Post, as it faces new competition from artificial intelligence voice assistants from rivals.
Access to the upgraded version of the assistant will require a paid subscription, the documents said.
The release, scheduled to occur just weeks before the presidential election, will include a new “Smart Briefing” feature that provides daily, AI-generated summaries of news articles selected based on a customer’s preferences, the documents said.
Alexa has previously struggled to accurately answer questions about political news events, such as who won the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Rival tech companies, including Microsoft and Google, have programmed their own AI chatbots Copilot and Gemini to decline to answer questions about politics, in light of concerns about misinformation in a year of consequential global elections.
But Amazon documents said that “AI features that help customers curate, summarize, and explore current events was also rated as one of the top customer requests.” News summaries can create a daily habit and drive “recurrent engagement,” according to the internal communications, used to track progress ahead of product launches.
A subscription to the new assistant could cost as much as $10 a month, the documents said, but the original version, referred to as “classic Alexa,” will remain free to use. Amazon management is planning to make final decisions on pricing, subscription structure and the product name this month, according to documents obtained by The Post.
The company declined to comment on this story. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)
Other features of the new Alexa, sometimes referred to as Remarkable Alexa or Project Banyan in the documents, include help finding recipes and a chatbot aimed at children. The documents also describe new conversational shopping tools, which if they boost e-commerce sales could, along with subscription fees, help Amazon recoup some of its investment into Alexa.
More than 500 million Alexa devices have been sold, but Amazon has not disclosed revenue or other financial details for the project. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that development costs and consumers mostly using free functions of Alexa have contributed to the company’s devices business losing tens of billions of dollars.
Amazon first announced that Alexa would get a major AI overhaul in September 2023. The project was seen as Amazon’s response to the emergence of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which prompted leading tech companies to invest more heavily in AI. An internal Amazon document from earlier this year obtained by The Post said the revamped assistant was due to launch in September 2024.
The mid-October launch described in the new internal documents would mean it took Amazon more than a year to bring the project to fruition, slower than other major tech companies have launched some major AI projects since the debut of ChatGPT.
Amazon has not released a general-purpose chatbot similar to ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini or Microsoft Copilot, although it has launched a shopping assistant called Rufus. But the documents said that alongside the new Alexa the company plans to launch Project Metis, a web-based product, previously reported by Business Insider, that is meant to directly compete with ChatGPT-style tools.
The new Amazon Alexa is supposed to feel more conversational and charismatic, according to the documents. They describe how the assistant will learn to recognize the individual voices of new customers and ask people questions about themselves so as to be more helpful later.
“Tell me something about what you like to do on the weekends?” the device might ask, or, “Would you like to tell me more about your family?” If a user tells the assistant about their family’s dietary restrictions future recipe suggestions can take that into account. The more the AI assistant can predict customer’s needs, the more “like-able” customers will perceive it to be, the documents said.
The new AI Alexa will also help customers with other daily tasks, like finding recipes. “Food assistance was ranked one of the top 3 areas where customers want more help from AI enabled assistance,” according to the documents.
Many new features are aimed at making the Amazon shopping experience easier, which could help Amazon recoup its investment into Alexa through increased e-commerce sales.
Customers who pay for AI Alexa will be able to ask it questions about product details and appearance, like “what colors do the shoes come in?,” “what are the ingredients?” or “do you have any deals on headphones?”, according to the documents. A forthcoming product referred to as Shopping Scout can notify customers when an item they’re looking to buy goes on sale is described as “a marquee feature to drive subscriptions.”
Amazon also hopes AI Alexa will prove compelling to children. An experience called Explore with Alexa 2.0 will allow verified children to “have back-and-forth, exploratory conversations with Alexa about any topic under the sun,” the documents said. The children’s experience will be “safe and moderated,” the documents said, and in compliance with regulation.
(c) Washington Post
