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Amazon’s (AMZN+0.40%) popular virtual assistant finally got its generative artificial intelligence update.
The tech giant announced Alexa Plus on Wednesday, which now enables new capabilities such as assisting users with tasks such as shopping for groceries and sending event invites, according to The Verge. The upgraded AI-powered virtual assistant will also be able to memorize personal details about users, Amazon reportedly said, such as eating habits and other interests.
Users will be able to have conversations with Alexa Plus, which can also take and analyze photos, The Verge reported.
“Every once in a while, a technology comes around and it changes everything,” Panos Panay, senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon, said at an event on Wednesday, according to CNBC (CMCSA-2.05%). “[Large language models] enter the stage and fundamentally change the way we think about AI...It’s shaken up everything.”
The Alexa Plus service will be free for Amazon Prime subscribers when it begins rolling out next month, or $19.99 per month for non-Prime members, CNBC reported. Panay told CNBC that the service will be available on “almost every” Alexa device.
During Amazon’s third-quarter earnings call in October, Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy said the company was continuing “to rearchitect the brain” of its virtual assistant with a set of next-generation foundation models — or larger models trained on broad, generalized data sets.
“When we first were pursuing Alexa, we had this vision of it being the world’s best personal assistant and people thought that was kind of a crazy idea,” David Fildes, Amazon vice president of investor relations, said. “And I think if you look at what’s happened in generative AI over the last couple of years, I think you’re kind of missing the boat if you don’t believe that’s going to happen. It absolutely is going to happen.”
In June, Fortune reported that the AI-powered Alexa — which Amazon demoed the previous September and said would be available for a free preview on its Alexa-fitted devices in the U.S. — was not even close to being ready. Former employees told the publication that the company didn’t have enough data nor access to the chips needed to run the large language models (LLM) powering the new version of its virtual assistant. The company also reportedly deprioritized Alexa AI to focus on building generative AI for its cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services.
At the time, Amazon said its former employees were incorrect and uninformed on its Alexa AI efforts, and that the Amazon Artificial General Intelligence team had access to both in-house Trainium chips and Nvidia’s (NVDA+3.34%) chips.