Amazon Wants You to Start Paying for Alexa

More than 75 million people use WatchTop 5 Shopping Tips for Amazon Prime Day CCShare SubtitlesOffEnglishThe new service is tentatively called “Alexa Plus,” and it even has a launch date set for June 30, Business Insider reported. It seems that deadline will be hard to meet. AdvertisementAmazon is testing the underlying technology, dorkily named “Remarkable Alexa,” with 15,000 customers (If you’re one of them, we would love to talk to you about it). Employees who spoke to BI said that tests show Remarkable Alexa is great at having conversations and terrible at doing anything useful. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. AdvertisementThe new Alexa gives exceedingly long and often inaccurate answers, BI said, and it has a hard time with more complicated requests that require dealing with multiple services (e.g. play “Paranoid Android” and turn off the lights).Beyond the classic failures of this generation of artificial intelligence, the new Alexa requires a massive shift in both the company’s strategy and the technology running behind the scenes. Some long-time Alexa workers aren’t happy about it. According to BI, the team who built the original Alexa doesn’t want to let their baby go and has forced Amazon to maintain parts of the original technology stack, which makes the new Remarkable Alexa bloated and more difficult to run. AdvertisementThen there are people who aren’t sold on the entire project. The number of services Amazon wants to tack onto your monthly bill keeps growing. There’s This potentially doomed-from-the-start initiative is a response to growing pressure to make waves in the fledgling AI business. Google, Apple, and Amazon all spent billions of dollars developing smart assistants, a technology that was supposed to be the future of computing. Years later, that project failed to deliver any meaningful revenue. Silicon Valley generally views Alexa, AdvertisementNow there’s renewed interest in these assistants as a way for consumers to interface with next-generation AI. Amazon and more ambitious models in development. Adding AI to digital assistants is a no-brainer, and if Amazon can do it in a way that also turns Alexa into a money maker, it would solve a number of major headaches. If the plan doesn’t work, however, it could bring Alexa one step closer to the grave.

Based on reporting by gizmodo.com.