(Reuters) – Amazon.com will introduce a more conversational artificial intelligence-powered version of its Alexa voice assistant later this year and plans to charge a monthly subscription fee to offset technology costs, CNBC reported on Wednesday.
While the e-commerce giant is yet to nail down the price of the new services, a subscription to Alexa will not be included in its popular $139 annual Prime offering, the report said, citing people with knowledge of the company's plans.
The company has previously talked about the need to monetise Alexa which requires heavy investment and hardware to run and manage building AI applications for these systems. And the need is apparent with the likes of OpenAI and now Microsoft doing their best version of AI tools in both free and premium models.
The company is expected to call it Alexa Plus and it is assumed to work in a similar way to ChatGPT Plus and Copilot Pro from Microsoft.
Amazon has talked about its long game in the large language models (LLMs) arena in the coming years which was previewed with an Alexa that gave more human-like responses at an event in 2023. Amazon did showcase some of its paid services at the same event, which includes the emergency alerts that work through the Echo speakers but its purpose is still a novelty for most people.
It is remarkable to see the push for AI jump from all corners, and companies even feel tempted to go for a paid model using these tools for consumers. It does make sense when you are targeting businesses that need more data resources and applications support to run their operations, but for a regular user these AI features need to evolve and become polished to be even considered for a paid model.
OpenAI has already moved to ChatGPT 4o version which now brings voice interaction at an intuitive level. Microsoft is taking AI further ahead with Copilot Plus PCs launching over the next few months. Apple is expected to showcase its AI tools at the WWDC 2024 next month as well. Amazon will clearly not want to feel left out of the race, especially when it has the in-house resources to manage the heavy AI loads and systems.
(With Reuters inputs)
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