Amazon wants you to start paying for Alexa

Used by more than 75 million people Alexabut by Amazon standards, the service is A Miserable failure. The problem is that Alexa doesn't make any money, and the service is a huge drain on the company's resources. Apparently, Amazon has one last plan to save its digital assistant Charged using artificial intelligence They charge you a fee for the privilege of using it, but things aren't looking good.

According to a report in Interested in trade Thursday, Alexa's new secret barely works thanks to him Artificial intelligence hallucinations And broken technology. This clearly raised political tensions within the company, especially since many Amazon employees did not believe people would be willing to pay.

The new service is tentatively called “Alexa Plus,” and its launch date is set for June 30, Business Insider reported. It appears that the deadline will be difficult to meet.

Amazon is testing the core technology, called Remarkable Alexa, with 15,000 customers (if you're one of them, we'll do it) love To talk to you about this topic. Employees who spoke to BI said tests showed that Remarkable Alexa is great at having conversations and terrible at doing anything useful.

BI said the new Alexa gives overly long and often inaccurate answers, and has difficulty handling more complex requests that require handling multiple services (such as gaming).Paranoid robot“And turn off the lights.”

Far from the classic failures of this generation of AI, the new Alexa requires a massive shift in both corporate strategy and the technology working behind the scenes. Some long-time Alexa workers aren't happy about it. According to BI, the team that built the original Alexa didn't want to let its baby go, and forced Amazon to keep parts of the original technology stack, making the new Remarkable Alexa bloated and more difficult to operate.

Then there are people who are not sold on the entire project. The number of services Amazon is willing to add to your monthly bill continues to grow. there prime ministerOf course, but Amazon also offers various streaming services, Audible, and more. Employees reportedly told BI that many people don't think the company will be able to convince its customers to pay a fee to use a smart speaker on top of the money they already pay.

This initiative, which was likely doomed to fail from the start, is a response to growing pressures to make a splash in the emerging AI business. Google, Apple, and Amazon have spent billions of dollars developing smart assistants, a technology that was supposed to be the future of computing. Years later, this project failed to generate any meaningful revenue. Silicon Valley generally views Alexa, Google AssistantAnd Siri As misguided investments, teams working on smart speakers have been particularly hard hit by layoffs and budget cuts in recent years. After making such a big deal about them, the tech industry doesn't want to let them go.

There is now renewed interest in these assistants as a way for consumers to interact with next-generation AI. Amazon and apple In particular they are playing catch up in that arena afterwards Google, Microsoft and OpenAI Escape with the AI ​​hype cycle. Amazon has built its own AI models to compete with the ChatGPTs of the world, Which the company calls QAnd it is said that even 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 problems. However, if the plan doesn't work out, it could bring Alexa one step closer to the grave.