Amazon has famously sunk a ton of money into the Alexa project with little to show for it. Now, a new report from The Wall Street Journal suggests that the shopping giant will charge around $10/month for people to use its supercharged AI Alexa to help offset the cost of the Alexa/Echo project.
This new Alexa could be out in as little as a few weeks or months, but it will be hard-pressed to make back the $25 billion USD (about $34.4 billion CAD) that Amazon has sunk into the Alexa project over the years.
This AI-powered Alexa was shown off at an Amazon event in late September of 2023 to moderate fanfare. It was cool to see a live product demo, and the service did seem helpful, but at the end of it, I felt like the old Alexa should have been able to do most of these things, but it just isn’t very good. The new Alexa should understand human speech/context much better, and it could also answer multiple questions at once, but a lot of the AI-enhancements feel like things that Amazon promised voice assistants could do years ago.
That all being said, reports have surfaced that Amazon is behind and the AI Alexa is not living up to the standards set when the service was revealed. Combining missed expectations with the idea of charging for Alexa also seems to be something causing contention at Amazon, according to the report.
Source: Wall Street Journal
MobileSyrup may earn a commission from purchases made via our links, which helps fund the journalism we provide free on our website. These links do not influence our editorial content. Support us here.
