All we've got to say is, good luck with that.
According to The Verge, Amazon is planning to release a newer, subscription-based version of Alexa - the "assistant" who knows to set food timers and tell you the weather and, well, that's pretty much it, with generative artificial intelligence support that will cost as much as $10 a month. Alexa will still be free for the basic version you have now, but the newly upgraded version will offer conversational generative AI with a monthly fee, which the Wall Street Journal reports could launch as soon as this month.
While Amazon is reportedly targeting an August launch date for this new version of Alexa but that is subject to change. This comes as Amazon has started to roll out an improved version of Alexa on Fire TVs to help make finding movies and TV shows easier.
Amazon hopes that putting its AI-upgraded Alexa –which may be called “Alexa Plus” or “Remarkable Alexa”– behind a paywall will drive revenue, but the plan is under a lot of pressure according to CordcutterNews.
In 2022, reports said Alexa was set to lose Amazon $10 billion that year. As recent as November, Amazon cut several hundred jobs in its Alexa division. In short, a smaller team has to handle more work in a short amount of time.
In addition, asking people who already use the voice assistant to start paying for it could backfire.
“[S]ome were questioning the entire premise of charging for Alexa,” sources said in the report of other Amazon employees said earlier this year. “For example, people who already pay for an existing Amazon service, such as Amazon Music, might not be willing to pay additional money to get access to the newer version of Alexa.”
The new technology has been tested by 15,000 customers, according to the report, and while it excels in human-like conversation, it’s “deflecting answers, often giving unnecessarily long or inaccurate responses.”
This comes after Amazon unveiled an upgraded, more human-sounding version of Alexa in September. The enhancements aim to bring the company’s voice assistant in line with newer artificial intelligence technology.
In the end of the day, however, the question is "would you pay for use Alexa", and if not, just how brittle is the AI castle in the sky built on hopes of dreams of widespread adoption and which has singlehandedly propped up the market for the past two years...