‘Amazon wants to create a new, smarter Alexa and put it behind a subscription’

Amazon plans to partially put voice assistant Alexa behind a paywall. The company then wants to release a subscription called Alexa Plus, which will allow the assistant to speak smarter and more naturally. According to Business Insider, that plan is essential for Alexa.

Business Insider is based on internal sources and documents from the company. According to Business Insider, Amazon plans to launch Alexa Plus later this year. This is based on a technology that Amazon calls ‘Remarkable Alexa’. Amazon said at an event last year that it was working on a new technology for the assistant, which makes more use of artificial intelligence. The company would like to go live on June 30 and is now testing with 15,000 users.

Remarkable Alexa is a completely new version of the technology behind the assistant, which Amazon now calls ‘Classic Alexa’. It is a natural language model in which various components, such as personality and context, are integrated into the assistant in different ways. Remarkable Alexa will have a central structure with a single language model. This means that the assistant can be smarter, but also provide more personal answers.

However, the documents seen by Business Insider also show that Amazon is far from satisfied with the new technology. Alexa should be able to have better conversations with the technology, in a more natural way, but in practice the assistant with Remarkable Alexa often gives evasive or wrong answers.

There is said to be internal disagreement at Amazon about the company’s direction around Alexa. Some of the engineers reportedly want to further expand Classic Alexa and make it smarter, while others say that the assistant will have to be rebuilt from the ground up. There would also be a difference of opinion about the payment model. According to many Amazon employees, it would not make sense to charge existing customers, who, for example, already pay for Prime, even more money for the assistant.

The documents from Business Insider do not show what the smart assistant should cost. It is also unclear whether it will be part of a package and whether Alexa can also be used partly free. It has been known for some time that Amazon is struggling with what it wants to achieve with Alexa. In 2022 it turned out that Amazon was making billions in losses with the voice assistant. It still does not have a good revenue model. Business Insider spoke to a source who hinted that the paid subscription is a last straw. If that doesn’t work, “Alexa is in trouble,” says that source.