Amazon’s Alexa is undergoing its biggest overhaul since debuting more than a decade ago.
On Wednesday, Amazon said it was giving Alexa a new brain powered by generative artificial intelligence. The update, called Alexa+, is set to make the virtual assistant more conversational and helpful in booking concert tickets, coordinating calendars and suggesting food to be delivered. Alexa+ will cost $19.99 a month or be included for customers who pay for Amazon’s Prime membership program. It will roll out next month.
“Until right this moment, right this moment, we have been limited by the technology,” Panos Panay, the head of Amazon’s devices, said at a media event. “Alexa+ is that trusted assistant that can help you conduct your life and your home.”
With the changes, Amazon is aiming to catch up in generative A.I. for everyday users. While the Seattle company has in recent months made up for lost time in A.I. products and services that it sells to businesses and other organizations, its grip on consumer A.I. products has been narrower. Alexa’s upgrades, which were first teased in 2023, are Amazon’s biggest bet on becoming a force in consumer A.I.
The moves are also an opportunity to reboot Alexa, which has been perceived as having fallen behind other virtual assistants. In recent years, Alexa’s growth in the United States has generally stagnated, according to the research firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, with people turning to the assistant for only a few main tasks, such as setting timers and alarms, playing music and asking questions about the weather and sports scores.
At Wednesday’s event, Mr. Panay and other Amazon executives demonstrated how Alexa+ could do those things in a more personalized manner. Alexa+ could identify who was speaking and know their preferences, such as favorite sports teams, musicians and foods, they said. They also showed how a device powered by Alexa+ could suggest a restaurant, book a reservation on OpenTable, order an Uber and send a calendar invite.
Alexa, which was a brainchild of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, made its debut in 2014, wowing people with its ability to take verbal requests and translate them into actions. It became a symbol of Amazon’s innovation. Over the years, the company has highlighted some Alexa-connected devices, including Echo speakers, a connected microwave, wall clock and twerking teddy bear.
But wild experimentation has been out since Mr. Bezos stepped down as Amazon’s chief executive in 2021 and handed the company over to Andy Jassy, a longtime executive. Mr. Jassy reined in Amazon’s expenses, killed some projects that appeared to have no obvious prospects and oversaw layoffs. In 2023, he hired Mr. Panay, a Microsoft executive, to oversee devices.
Mr. Panay’s top responsibility was to bring generative A.I. to Alexa and to unlock the promise of the all-helpful assistant that Amazon had long envisioned. Soon after Mr. Panay started, Amazon said it was rebuilding Alexa’s brain with the kind of technologies that underpinned OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.
“The re-architecture of all of Alexa has happened,” Mr. Panay said on Wednesday.
As Amazon worked to update Alexa, competitors have leapfrogged it. ChatGPT, for example, can hold extended, in-depth conversations, with some people developing emotional — and even sexual — relationships with A.I. personas.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have denied the claims.)
Bringing generative A.I. to Alexa was not easy because the virtual assistant faces challenges that a chatbot does not. Alexa might serve multiple users in a household, for instance, so it needs to distinguish who is speaking.
Amazon also wants Alexa to be at the center of people’s lives and connected to multiple smart devices, which is complicated. Rohit Prasad, who heads the development of Amazon’s A.I. systems, said in an interview last year that he had 23 different devices, like smart lightbulbs, controlled through his Alexa system.
“It’s extremely hard to do that right, with high reliability, every day,” he said.
Generative A.I. has also been afflicted by “hallucinations,” or when the A.I. systems serve up incorrect information. Because Alexa interacts with the real world — playing a song, ordering a product, turning off an alarm — customers must see Alexa as a reliable assistant, Mr. Prasad said.
“You cannot afford the kind of hallucination rates that can happen if you’re executing your light switches,” he said.
