Amazon's plan to launch a paid version of Alexa faces technical issues and internal politics.
Amazon is revamping its Alexa voice assistant as it prepares to launch a new paid subscription plan this year, according to internal documents and people familiar with the matter. But the change is causing internal conflict and may lead to further delay.
Tentatively called "Alexa Plus," the paid version of Alexa is intended to offer more conversational and personalized AI technology, said one of the documents obtained by Business Insider.
But the quality of the new Alexa's answers is still falling short of expectations, often sharing inaccurate information, external tests have found.
Do they really expect people will pay for a large language model making up results on-the-fly?
"If this fails to get revenue, Alexa is in trouble," one of the people told BI.
I will not shed a tear when Alexa gets shut off, to be honest.
Microsoft is expecting people to pay $20 US per user per month for their Copilot assistant in Windows. They're all going to crank up the prices for this dubious service.