Amazon is preparing to postpone a major overhaul of its personal voice assistant Alexa to October as it faces new competition from rival artificial intelligence voice assistants, according to an internal document obtained by The Washington Post.
Access to the enhanced version of the assistant will require a paid subscription, according to the document.
The release, scheduled for weeks before the presidential election, will include a new Smart Briefing feature that will deliver a daily AI-generated summary of news articles selected based on customers’ preferences, the document said.
Alexa has previously had difficulty accurately answering questions about political news, such as who won the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Rival technology companies such as Microsoft and Google have programmed their AI chatbots, Copilot and Gemini, to avoid answering questions about politics amid concerns about misinformation in a crucial global election year.
But according to the Amazon document, “AI features that help customers curate, summarize, and explore current events was also rated as one of the top customer requests.” News summaries could become a daily habit and drive “recurrent engagement,” according to internal communications used to track progress ahead of the product launch.
Subscriptions for the new assistant could cost up to $10 a month, the document states, while the original version, called “Classic Alexa,” will remain free. Amazon management will make decisions about pricing, subscription structure and product name this month, according to documents obtained by The Post.
The company declined to comment for this article. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)
Other features of the new Alexa, also called “Remarkable Alexa” or “Project Banyan” in the document, include recipe search help and a chatbot for kids. The document also outlines new tools for conversational shopping, which could help Amazon recoup some of its investment in Alexa if it can generate more e-commerce sales along with subscription fees.
Though more than 500 million Alexa devices have been sold, Amazon has not disclosed revenue or other financial details about the project. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that development costs and consumer adoption of Alexa’s mostly free features have led to tens of billions of dollars in losses in the company’s devices business.
Amazon first announced that Alexa would undergo a major AI overhaul in September 2023. The project is seen as Amazon’s response to the emergence of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which prompted big tech companies to increase investments in AI. An internal Amazon document from earlier this year obtained by the Post said the revamped assistant is set to launch in September 2024.
The mid-October launch, described in the new internal documents, means Amazon has taken more than a year to bring the project to fruition, slower than other major tech companies that have launched several large AI projects since ChatGPT’s debut.
While Amazon hasn’t released a general-purpose chatbot like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot, it has released a shopping assistant called Rufus. According to the document, the company also wants to launch Project Metis, a web-based product already reported by Business Insider, alongside the new Alexa, aimed at directly competing with ChatGPT-style tools.
According to the document, the new Amazon Alexa should feel more talkative and charismatic. These explain how the assistant will learn to recognize the individual voices of new customers and ask people questions about themselves so it can better support customers later.
“Tell me something about what you like to do on the weekends?” the device might ask, or, “Would you like to tell me more about your family?” If a user tells the assistant about their family’s dietary restrictions future recipe suggestions can take that into account. The more the AI assistant can predict customer’s needs, the more “like-able” customers will perceive it to be, the documents said.
The new AI Alexa will also help customers with other everyday tasks, such as finding recipes. “Food assistance was ranked one of the top 3 areas where customers want more help from AI enabled assistance,” the document states.
Many of the new features are aimed at making the Amazon shopping experience easier, potentially allowing Amazon to recoup its investment in Alexa through increased e-commerce sales.
Customers who pay for AI Alexa will be able to ask it questions about product details and appearance, like “what colors do the shoes come in?,” “what are the ingredients?” or “do you have any deals on headphones?”, according to the documents. A forthcoming product referred to as Shopping Scout can notify customers when an item they’re looking to buy goes on sale is described as “a marquee feature to drive subscriptions.”
Amazon also hopes that Alexa AI will be appealing to children. The document says the experience, called “Explore with Alexa 2.0 will allow verified children to “have back-and-forth, exploratory conversations with Alexa about any topic under the sun,” the documents said. The children’s experience will be “safe and moderated,” the documents said, and in compliance with regulations.