Thought Leadership
ChatGPT and his competitors stole the show from Amazon’s Alexa. A new version can now converse with users. The aim is to create an AI assistant that is useful in everyday life.
Now that AI chatbots have overshadowed Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa, the company is going on the counter-offensive. Amazon’s answer to ChatGPT and the like is called “Alexa+”, will only be free for Prime subscription customers and will be able to converse fluently with users. In Germany, you will have to be patient for the time being: The new Alexa is only available in the USA for the time being, but a German version is to come.
Amazon is building on the fact that Alexa is intertwined with customers’ lives – and can therefore be more useful to them than other AI programs. The outpost is the Group’s millions of networked speakers under the Echo brand. Most of them are ready for the new software. The vision is an artificial intelligence that can take on the role of an assistant in everyday life. For this plan to work, however, many apps and services need to be connected to Alexa.
Independent action
But then the new Alexa will make life easier for users on demand. When asked to reserve a table at the “usual” restaurant on Friday, the software goes through information from a booking app about previous visits. If you tell Alexa that the oven is broken, it searches for a repair service. In another demonstration, Amazon’s head of devices Panos Panay told the software that his wife is a vegetarian and doesn’t like peanut butter. When he asks Alexa+ for recipes “for the family” in future, she will take this into account, he emphasized.
Free choice of words
A key difference to the previous Alexa is that you no longer have to stick to certain terms or phrases – instead, the software should recognize the meaning of what is being said. There will also no longer be “dead ends” where Alexa doesn’t understand what you want her to do. Instead, the software will keep asking until it understands, said Panay. If you tell Alexa that you want to listen to music while doing the dishes, she switches on the loudspeaker in the kitchen.
Cheaper with a Prime subscription
The pricing clearly shows that Amazon wants to see Alexa+ users on its Prime subscription. It costs 14.99 dollars per month in the US or 139 dollars for a year – and with the new Alexa alone, Amazon set a monthly price of 19.99 dollars. Prime customers have the advantage that they can also integrate Amazon’s photo storage as well as music and video streaming with Alexa+, said Panay. At the same time, however, this is not a prerequisite, as it will also be possible to integrate services from other providers, such as calendars from competitors.
Long development time
Amazon introduced Alexa in 2014 – and brought it into many households with the Echo speakers. However, with the release of the chatbot ChatGPT a good two years ago, the classic voice assistants suddenly seemed very limited. Many people only use them to set timers and operate networked lights.
The previous head of devices, Dave Limp, announced a version of Alexa that you can talk to in September 2023. But the software is only now ready. According to Panay, it took longer to avoid incorrect answers, among other things. AI software is known for “hallucinations” – false statements that it simply makes up. To prevent this from happening, the answers are checked several times. The trick is not to need too much time for this.
Lots of competition
The new Alexa software is not only competing against AI chatbots – but also against similar visions from Apple and Google. With “Apple Intelligence”, the iPhone company also wants to benefit from the fact that its customers have all the necessary data on their devices for an AI assistant that is useful in everyday life. And Google is also relying on its decades of expertise in internet searches and object recognition. Amazon, meanwhile, relies on users outside the household to feed the Alexa app with information. Amazon quickly discontinued its own smartphone, which was launched in 2014 just a few months before Alexa.
dpa
