Amazon CEO Andy Jassy today hinted at an improved “agent” version of the company's Alexa assistant, a version that can perform actions on your behalf.
“The next generation of these assistants and generative AI applications will not only answer questions and summarize, index, and aggregate data, but also take action,” he said during Amazon's Q3 2024 earnings call. I think he's also very good at it,” he said. “And you can imagine we're pretty good at that with Alexa.”
Jassy added that Amazon continues to “reimagine the brain” of Alexa with “a series of new underlying models” that it plans to announce “in the near future.”
Amazon first announced that it would update Alexa with generative AI technology in 2023, but it is said to be replacing its Alexa-enabled models with Anthropic models after facing technical challenges. (Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.) At one point during Alexa's redesign, the unannounced upgraded assistant struggled to turn on its smart lights and took up to 6 seconds before responding to queries. It reportedly took seconds.
The new Alexa, codenamed internally “Remarkable Alexa,” will reportedly cost between $5 and $10 per month and will be offered alongside a free plan with fewer features. Some reports said it would arrive in October, but it appears there has been a delay.
Even though Alexa is installed on more than 500 million devices worldwide, it doesn't contribute significantly to Amazon's revenue. The company has lost tens of billions of dollars in device business since 2017, according to the Wall Street Journal.