According to internal documents and sources familiar with the matter, Amazon is improving its Alexa voice assistant and is preparing to launch a new paid subscription plan this year.
According to an internal document, the paid version of Alexa is temporarily named "Alexa Plus", aimed at providing users with more dialogue and personalized artificial intelligence technology.
According to insiders, the team has set the deadline for the release date to June 30th and has currently invited 15000 external clients to help test the underlying voice technology Remarkable Alexa.
But the problem is that external testing has found that Remarkable Alexa's answer quality is still lower than expected, often sharing inaccurate information.
Dissatisfied with results
Obviously, Amazon is not satisfied with Remarkable Alexa's performance internally.
Insiders pointed out that limited testing conducted on 15000 external clients found that although Remarkable Alexa is generally better at dialogue and providing information, it still deviates from the answer and often provides unnecessary lengthy or inaccurate answers; In addition, it also needs to improve its ability to respond to customer requests, which may be ambiguous and may include multiple prompts, such as "turning on lights and music simultaneously".
According to insiders, Remarkable Alexa still does not meet the quality standards that Alexa Plus should have, and redesigning Alexa poses technical challenges and complexity.
To address this issue, Amazon is currently attempting a major overhaul of Alexa's technology stack.
Alexa's Commercial Vision
Although Amazon's Alexa voice assistant achieved well-known success in the early stages, it has been attempting to establish a viable business model, but the plan was not successful, leading to the team conducting large-scale layoffs and cost cutting measures in the past year.
Last year, Amazon partially showcased the new version of Alexa, which integrates generative artificial intelligence, at a hardware launch event. Dave Limp, former hardware and device manager at Amazon, also stated that due to the high cost of running artificial intelligence models, the company will have to start charging for the more advanced Alexa at some point.
It is reported that this paid subscription plan will receive support from a new version of Alexa, which is Amazon's latest attempt to revive voice technology, which was once considered key to its future.
According to an insider, "If this doesn't generate income yet, Alexa will be in trouble."
For Alexa, this change comes at a critical moment as this voice assistant has fallen behind competitors such as Google and Apple in recent years. According to Insider Intelligence, Google Language Assistant will have 88.8 million users in the United States this year; Next is Apple Siri, with 84.2 million users; Alexa ranks third with 75.6 million users.
In fact, another existing issue is whether people will pay for Alexa. Insiders believe that users who have already paid for Amazon's existing services may not be willing to pay extra to use the new version of Alexa.