Complete overhaul

Alexa to become smarter and chargeable

According to insiders, Amazon wants to equip its digital assistant Alexa with artificial intelligence (AI) and charge for these additional functions in future. A monthly fee of around five dollars is being considered, several people familiar with the matter said on Friday. 

At times, around ten dollars was also being discussed, Reuters reported. A link to Prime membership is not planned. To date, the online retailer has been in the red with Alexa

According to the report, the AI integration is part of a complete overhaul of the assistant, which was launched in 2014. The improved version is called "Remarkable Alexa". Company boss Andy Jassy is personally overseeing the project. He had promised a "smarter and more capable Alexa" in a letter to shareholders in April, without giving details. The company is urging employees to complete the overhaul by August.

"We have already integrated generative AI into various components of Alexa and are working hard to implement it at scale," a spokeswoman for the company said. Half a billion Alexa-enabled devices are in use worldwide. The pressure to succeed is high after Apple introduced AI functions for its Alexa competitor Siri a few weeks ago.

Alexa has so far fallen short of expectations
The previous free Amazon assistant, known internally as "Classic Alexa", can carry out simple voice commands and read out a weather report, play music or control smart devices in the home. However, Amazon's hopes of using this service to encourage customers to place additional orders have not yet been fulfilled.

Insiders doubt that customers will pay extra for an AI Alexa, even if the assistant is able to solve complex tasks and hold conversations in natural language in the future. Users would also have to replace some of their smart household appliances in order to be able to use all of the new Alexa functions to control them.