Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on Thursday hinted at an improved, “agentic” version of the company’s Alexa assistant — one that could take actions on a user’s behalf.
“I think that the next generation of these assistants and generative AI applications will be better at not just answering questions and summarizing, indexing, and aggregating data, but also taking actions,” he said during Amazon’s Q3 2024 earnings call. “And you can imagine us being pretty good at that with Alexa.”
Jassy added that Amazon continues to “re-architect the brain” of Alexa with “a new set of foundation models” that the company plans to reveal “in the near future.”
Amazon, which first announced that it’d revamp Alexa with generative AI technologies in 2023, is said to be replacing its own Alexa-powering models with Anthropic’s after encountering technical challenges. (Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.) At one point during the Alexa redesign, the unreleased, upgraded assistant reportedly struggled to turn on smart lights and took up to six seconds to respond to queries.
The new Alexa, code-named “Remarkable Alexa” internally, will reportedly cost $5 to $10 per month, offered alongside a less capable free plan. Some reports indicated that it would arrive in October, but it’s seemingly suffering delays.
Bloomberg reports the timeline has slipped into 2025.
Despite being in over a half billion devices worldwide, Alexa hasn’t contributed meaningfully to Amazon’s bottom line. The company has lost tens of billions of dollars in its devices business since 2017, according to The Wall Street Journal.