There have been rumors for years that Amazon may put its digital assistant Alexa behind some sort of paywall, and now we have some more concrete evidence, with a Reuters story reporting on a big internal project to turn the Alexa money tap on.
The report is based on information from “eight current and former employees who worked on Alexa and who spoke on the condition of anonymity” who spilled the beans on the so-called ‘Banyan’ project… AKA ‘Remarkable Alexa.’
Purported is a “conversational generative AI with two tiers of service and has considered a monthly fee of around $5-$10 to access the superior version,” with users expected to “ask it for shopping advice like which gloves and hat to purchase for a mountain climbing trip.”
The report quotes sources describing Banyan as a “desperate attempt” to turn Alexa into a profitable arm of the business in a “must win” year.
And boy does it sound desperate. If the top dogs at Amazon think making Alexa even more convoluted is a good idea – and then making people pay for the privilege of accessing those smarts then that’s the thing that truly is Remarkable.
It’s not as if Amazon hasn’t jumped aboard the AI bandwagon, and made Alexa ‘smarter’, already.
Way back in 2020, Alexa put the AZ1 Neural Edge processor, which the company described as “an all-new silicon module that’s purpose-built for accelerating machine learning applications” inside that year’s Echo speaker refreshes.
In 2021, Amazon posted how “Alexa keeps getting smarter” because “the latest AI innovations are making Amazon devices and services more useful for everyone” and highlighted new Alexa features such as Custom Sound Event Detection and learning personal preferences as examples of this.
At last year’s Amazon launch event we were told to expect a “smarter and more conversational Alexa, powered by generative AI… based on a new large language model (LLM) that’s been custom-built and specifically optimized for voice interactions.”
What I’m trying to say is that there’s not going to be a silver bullet that suddenly makes Alexa the leader in AI capabilities. Amazon has been working on this stuff for years already and there’s nothing yet that has set Alexa apart, certainly not anything that anyone is going to pay money for.
The good news, from a smart home perspective however, is that these changes – as with most Alexa ‘improvements’ – seem to be based on the conversational, digital ‘helper’ side of things… shopping suggestions, itinerary plannings, helping draft emails and so on.
I don’t think Bezos and the boys are gonna start charging us $10 to turn our smart lights on or off.
There maybe some sort of AI routine automation aspect, that I (and I’m betting millions of others) will quite happily ignore if it costs extra.
Alexa is a problem for Amazon, I get that. It’s a division where, sadly, several hundred lost their jobs in November 2023, with Daniel Rausch, Amazon’s vice president of Alexa and Fire TV, saying at the time that the cuts were part of a process “to better align with our business priorities… which includes maximizing our resources and efforts focused on generative AI.”
Fast forward a few months and it seems, if these reports ring true, that slapping an AI badge on Alexa charging $10 for a ‘superior’ version is where those focused efforts landed.
Remarkable.
