Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on Thursday hinted at an improved, “agentic” version of the corporate's Alexa assistant — one that would take motion on a user's behalf.
“I believe the following generation of those assistants and generative AI applications shall be higher at not only answering questions and summarizing, indexing and aggregating data, but additionally taking motion,” he said through the earnings call of Amazon's third quarter of 2024. “And you possibly can imagine that we will try this pretty much with Alexa.”
Jassy added that Amazon continues to “redesign the brain” of Alexa with “recent core models” that the corporate plans to introduce “within the near future.”
Amazon, which first announced it might upgrade Alexa with generative AI technologies in 2023, is predicted to accomplish that substitute his own Alexa-powered models with Anthropic after encountering technical challenges. (Amazon is a significant investor in Anthropic.) At some point during Alexa's redesign, the unreleased, upgraded The assistant reportedly had difficulty turning on smart lights and took as much as six seconds to answer questions.
The recent Alexa, internally codenamed “Remarkable Alexa,” will reportedly cost $5 to $10 monthly and shall be offered alongside a less powerful free plan. Some reports suggested it might arrive in October, but there look like delays.
Despite being built into over half a billion devices worldwide, Alexa has not made a big contribution to Amazon's bottom line. The company has lost tens of billions of dollars in its device business since 2017. after to the Wall Street Journal.
