Amazon is readying a powerful, smarter, and quicker “agentic” Alexa, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy hinted. The next generation of Alexa would feature capable Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) but Amazon would charge a monthly subscription fee.
What is the ‘agentic’ version of Amazon Alexa?
Amazon Alexa predates most of the Gen AI platforms that are popular today. The smart assistant, with dedicated hardware, was capable of listening, understanding, and answering audio queries and taking requests. However, Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and others seem to have surpassed Amazon Alexa.
Hence, the company is reportedly readying the next generation of Amazon Alexa, which would be “agentic”. It would be capable of taking actions on a user’s behalf, hinted Andy. While speaking at Amazon’s Q3 2024 earnings call, he said, “I think that the next generation of these assistants and generative AI applications will be better at not just answering questions and summarizing, indexing, and aggregating data, but also taking actions. And you can imagine us being pretty good at that with Alexa.”
Amazon is continuously trying to “re-architect the brain” of Alexa with “a new set of foundation models,” Andy added. Amazon’s CEO did not confirm when Amazon would unleash the new agentic Alexa.
Amazon may charge a monthly subscription fee for the new Alexa
Amazon’s Alexa has been quite popular and continues to remain relevant despite the rapid proliferation of other Gen AI platforms. However, Amazon is acutely aware that Alexa hasn’t contributed meaningfully to Amazon’s bottom line.
Amazon invested heavily in Anthropic, a company that is working actively to develop safe and interactive AI LLMs and tools that are, “reliable, interpretable, and steerable”. Hence, it is quite likely that the agentic version of Alexa would have LLMs developed by Anthropic.
Amazon has reportedly codenamed the new version “Remarkable Alexa”. Some reports suggest Amazon may release two versions of the Remarkable Alexa next year. There would be an entry-level free version with basic functions. Amazon could charge anywhere between $5 and $10 per month for the premium version.
2024-11-01 15:04:54