According to sources familiar with the matter, Amazon is planning a major overhaul of its voice assistant Alexa service, which has been losing money for ten years. It will include AI chatbots and offer two levels of service, with a monthly fee of $5 to $10.
This will be Alexa's first major reform since its launch in 2014, and the new voice assistant will be called "Remarkable Alexa".
Some Amazon employees involved in the project said that this is Amazon's final attempt to revive Alexa services, and Amazon has requested employees to prepare the latest version of Alexa before the August deadline.
Amazon CEO Andy Jesse is very interested in the revitalization of Alexa. He promised in April to launch a "smarter and more capable Alexa," but did not provide more details.
Insiders claim that the company's plans for Alexa, including pricing and release dates, may change or be cancelled based on the progress of the project.
According to reports earlier this year, Amazon set a deadline of June 30th for the release of the new Alexa Assistant and invited 15000 external customers to help test the product.
A spokesperson for Amazon stated that they have integrated generative AI into different components of Alexa and are working to achieve large-scale applications, providing more proactive, personalized, and trustworthy services to customers on over 500 million Alexa enabled devices that are already spread across households worldwide.
For Amazon, it is crucial to keep up with competitors in the field of generative AI. Currently, in this round of technology competition, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have won more attention, while Amazon and Apple are far behind.
At the end of last year, Amazon announced that it would lay off hundreds of positions in the Alexa voice assistant business unit, citing a shift in business focus and investing more resources in the generative AI field.
Some Amazon employees have stated that revitalizing Alexa services is a "desperate attempt", as the service has never been profitable and has been caught off guard in the rise of super intelligent generative AI over the past 18 months.
Amazon has also been plagued by some issues in developing AI and other challenges, such as hallucinations (generating false or misleading information) and low morale among employees in the department.
Amazon executives pointed out that this year is a crucial year for Amazon, and the equipment department must prove that it can bring meaningful sales to the company.