Amazon shares rose 1.7% to $216.45 [File]
|Picture source: AP
Since its introduction more than a decade ago, Amazon revealed its first major reform of Alexa Voice Assistant on Wednesday and embed it into the generated artificial intelligence.
Since its launch in 2014, the work has loaded billions of dollars on Amazon, hoping to invest the service into a range of devices and ultimately drive sales on its major e-commerce website.
“Alexa almost knows the schedule in life, clever houses, preferences, the equipment used, the people you are related to, the entertainment you like, and the many applications you use, the many services you need,” Panos Panay, Amazon’s head of equipment and services, said at the launch event in New York.
Panay said the new service, called Alexa+, responds to the higher-level nomenclature of many technical and streaming service products.
Alexa+ is free for Amazon Prime members, and the price is $19.99 per month for non-Prime users. The service will be available to certain users in March, and the launch will expand to more people over time. Amazon has considered pricing for all users without Prime Bation at $5 or $10 per month.
Panay shows how Alexa stores customer preferences through tips—for example, family members are vegans who prefer Greek and Italian cuisine, but avoid peanut butter. It can be used to make dinner reservations and send timed text or reminders.
The service can be connected to Amazon products, such as ring doorbells, to display recordings of their cameras.
Alexa director Mara Segal said Alexa could review documents such as homeowners’ association contracts so residents know what is allowed, such as installing solar panels.
Amazon shares rose 1.7% to $216.45.
The event marks the unveiling of a secret project designed to make Alexa more conversational. Generated AI is an artificial intelligence that can be learned from data and improve over time.
Following the company’s talk, Amazon executives introduced different features of the service, such as using it for food ordering, smart home connectivity and video streaming. But it does not allow the media to test the service itself.
Some people working on the service told Reuters that occasionally giving user questions wrong answers or lag for a few seconds before completing the prompt. During Wednesday’s demonstrations, Panay and other executives had to ask about the response from Alexa’s service several times.
Amazon’s Alexa was launched three years after Apple’s Siri hit the iPhone Maker device, but Alexa helped make voice assistants more mainstream. Nevertheless, over the years, there has been a lack of solid improvements and overhauls to Alexa, which means consumer use of services erodes, especially in the AI era.
Apple has incorporated its AI capabilities, called Apple Intelligence’s AI capabilities, into its Siri Voice Assistant, and Google has improved its voice assistant using its AI Chatbot Gemini.
Alexa is voice-controlled software installed in products such as smart speakers that can be linked to Home Automation’s smart speakers by linking devices connected to the Internet, playing music, setting a timer and serving as a hub for home automation to turn on lights, for example, using voice prompts.
The new Alexa AI service will be able to respond to multiple prompts in sequence, and can even act as a “proxy” by taking action by users without direct participation. This is in contrast to the current iteration that usually only handles a single request.
Amazon says consumers already have about 500 million Alexa-capable devices in their hands, meaning a huge profit-making opportunity for Seattle retailers, which is a huge financial risk if it doesn’t meet expectations.
Amazon says Alexa+ will use Amazon’s AI Services to rob bag BedRock to use the best AI model to allow experimentation.
But Alexa and Echo vice president Daniel Rausch acknowledged the contribution of AI startups to building Alexa+, confirming the Reuters story that humanity’s Claude is the foundation of the service.
Amazon has invested $8 billion in humans.
publishing – February 27, 2025 at 08:11 am
