New Alexa to debut later this fall in October
Amazon’s long-awaited, AI-powered Alexa upgrade is finally set to drop this October, according to insider info from The Washington Post (subscription required). As AI voice assistants from competitors start to heat up, Amazon seems ready to step up its game and bring its revamped Alexa to users soon.As buzzed about earlier, the new AI-powered Alexa might come with a subscription price of up to $10 a month. However, the original “classic Alexa” will still be available for free. Amazon is expected to finalize the pricing, subscription details, and new product name within this month.
Set to launch just weeks ahead of the presidential election, the update will introduce a new Smart Briefing feature. It will deliver daily, AI-crafted summaries of news articles tailored to each user’s reading habits.
The revamped Alexa, sometimes called Remarkable Alexa or Project Banyan in internal documents, is expected to come with a bunch of other new features, too. Among these are recipe recommendations, a kid-friendly chatbot, and possibly new tools for conversational shopping.
Video credit – Amazon
On top of the new Alexa, the company is gearing up to introduce the previously rumored Project Metis, a web-based chatbot designed to take on OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini head-to-head.
The revamped Amazon Alexa aims to sound more chatty and engaging. It will pick up on the unique voices of users and even ask questions about them to offer better assistance down the line.
All of this aligns perfectly with the latest trends in AI and voice assistants. For instance, ChatGPT started rolling out its new Voice Mode, capable of sensing your emotions for more genuine, real-time chats. On top of that, Apple is giving Siri a makeover to sound more conversational and natural. Now, Alexa is also joining the trend. So, companies are striving to make their assistants feel more human, which I think can be a little unsettling.
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