A monthly fee of around $5 (€4.7) is being considered, several people familiar with the matter said on Friday. At times, around $10 was also discussed. A link to Prime membership is not planned. To date, the online retailer has been making losses with Alexa.
“Remarkable Alexa”
The AI integration is part of a complete overhaul of the assistant introduced in 2014. The improved version is called “Remarkable Alexa”. Company boss Andy Jassy is personally overseeing the project. In a letter to shareholders in April, he promised a “smarter and more capable Alexa” without giving any details. The company is urging employees to complete the overhaul by August.
“We have already integrated generative AI into various components of Alexa and are working hard to implement it on a large scale,” said a spokeswoman for the company. Half a billion Alexa-enabled devices are in use worldwide. The pressure to succeed is high after Apple introduced AI functions for Alexa competitor “Siri” a few weeks ago.
The previous free Amazon assistant, internally called “Classic Alexa”, can carry out simple voice commands and read out a weather report, play music or control smart devices in the home. Amazon’s hopes of using this service to encourage customers to place additional orders have not yet been fulfilled, however.
The insiders doubted that customers would pay extra for an AI Alexa, even if the assistant would be able to solve complex tasks and conduct conversations in natural language in the future. In addition, users would have to upgrade some of their smart household appliances in order to be able to use all of the new Alexa functions to control them.
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