Amazon CEO Andy Jassy today hinted at an improved, “agent” version of the company’s Alexa assistant, one that could take actions on a user’s behalf.
“I think the next generation of these generative AI assistants and applications will be better at not only answering questions and summarizing, indexing and aggregating data, but also at taking action,” he said during the company’s third-quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Amazon. “And you can imagine us being pretty good at that with Alexa.”
Jassy added that Amazon continues to “redesign the brain” of Alexa with “a new set of base models” that the company plans to reveal “in the near future.”
Amazon, which first announced it would revamp Alexa with generative AI technologies in 2023, is said to be replacing its own Alexa-powered models with Anthropic’s after encountering technical challenges. (Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.) At one point during Alexa’s redesign, the unreleased, updated The assistant reportedly had difficulty turning on the smart lights and took up to six seconds to respond to queries.
The new Alexa, internally codenamed “Remarkable Alexa,” will cost between $5 and $10 a month and will be offered alongside a less capable free plan. Some reports indicated it would arrive in October, but it is apparently experiencing delays.
Despite being present on more than 500 million devices worldwide, Alexa has not contributed significantly to Amazon’s results. The company has lost tens of billions of dollars in its device business since 2017. according to the Wall Street Journal.