Amazon is reportedly working on integrating artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities within its Alexa voice assistant, but users may have to pay more before they can use its services. The Seattle-based tech giant plans to improve its virtual voice assistant capabilities from 2023, likely not far behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. But a new report now highlights that while Alexa may get smarter, it won’t be bundled with a standard Amazon Prime subscription.
Amazon will make Alexa smarter
Amazon published a post in its newsroom last month titled “CEO Andy Jassy’s 2023 Letter to Shareholders”. The lengthy post detailed the tech giant’s vision for the next financial year and the strategies it plans to implement to stay ahead of the curve. In the announcement, the CEO said the company is working to build “an even more intelligent and capable Alexa.”
It is believed that the company could make use of its internal Titan family of large language models (LLM) that it has been working on for some time. Some of the published AI models also come with multi-modal capabilities, making them a good fit for a service like Alexa. However, Amazon is keeping the potential new Alexa features under wraps for now.
Some rumors suggest that Alexa might get better conversational capabilities than the GPT-4o or Gemini 1.5 Pro. Furthermore, it could also become more efficient at solving complicated tasks and understanding commands given in contextual language.
AI-powered Alexa might require another subscription
Currently, access to the basic functionality of Alexa is free and anyone can access it. Some of its premium use cases may require an Amazon Prime subscription (for Prime Music, Prime Video and more). However, according to a report by CNBC, the company could put AI-powered Alexa capabilities behind the second subscription.
Citing people familiar with the matter, the report claims that Amazon is not considering bundling an upgraded Alexa with a Prime subscription. The reason for this decision is that running servers for AI computing can be expensive. According to the report, the tech giant could shell out around $0.02 (roughly Rs. 1.50) per query, which could go up quickly. As a result, a price of $20 (roughly Rs. 1,770) per month was considered internally. However, the company reportedly hasn’t reached any conclusions yet.
