Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in the present day hinted at an improved, “agentic” model of the corporate’s Alexa assistant — one that would take actions on a person’s behalf.
“I feel that the subsequent technology of those assistants and generative AI functions can be higher at not simply answering questions and summarizing, indexing, and aggregating information, but additionally taking actions,” he throughout Amazon’s Q3 2024 earnings name. “And you possibly can think about us being fairly good at that with Alexa.”
Jassy added that Amazon continues to “re-architect the mind” of Alexa with “a brand new set of basis fashions” that the corporate plans to disclose “within the close to future.”
Amazon, which first introduced that it’d revamp Alexa with generative AI applied sciences in 2023, is alleged to be changing its personal Alexa-powering fashions with Anthropic’s after encountering technical challenges. (Amazon is a serious investor in Anthropic.) At one level in the course of the Alexa redesign, the unreleased, upgraded assistant reportedly struggled to activate sensible lights and took as much as six seconds to reply to queries.
The new Alexa, code-named “Remarkable Alexa” internally, will reportedly value $5 to $10 monthly, supplied alongside a much less succesful free plan. Some experiences indicated that it will arrive in October, however it’s seemingly struggling delays.
Despite being in over half a billion units worldwide, Alexa hasn’t contributed meaningfully to Amazon’s backside line. The firm has misplaced tens of billions of {dollars} in its units enterprise since 2017, in response to The Wall Street Journal.
