An attendee operates the brand new Amazon Echo machine.
Daniel Berman | Bloomberg | Getty Photos
Amazon introduced Wednesday it can maintain a product occasion on Feb. 26 in New York Metropolis, the place the corporate is anticipated to supply a long-awaited replace on its Alexa digital assistant.
An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the occasion will embrace information from its Alexa crew. Panos Panay, Amazon’s senior vice chairman of units and providers, can even be in attendance, in keeping with invitations despatched to media.
Amazon has been racing to launch a brand new model of its voice-activated Alexa software program that has extra superior synthetic intelligence capabilities. It’s responding to elevated competitors in generative AI from rivals corresponding to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot, in addition to Claude, the chatbot created by AI startup Anthropic, which has raised billions of {dollars} from Amazon and different traders.
Amazon executives have scheduled a “Go/No-go” assembly for Feb. 14 in preparation for releasing the souped-up Alexa to the general public, Reuters reported, citing individuals conversant in the matter.
The corporate first previewed a redesigned Alexa in 2023, displaying off a dwell dialog between an Amazon govt and the voice assistant as a part of a yet-to-be-released function referred to as Let’s Chat. Amazon shared few particulars following that occasion about additional Alexa updates, and it didn’t maintain its typical fall occasion in 2024, at which it sometimes broadcasts new merchandise.
CNBC reported final 12 months that Amazon was making ready to revamp Alexa with AI options, and that it could cost a month-to-month subscription price to offset the price of the expertise.
In October, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy advised traders the brand new Alexa might launch “within the close to future,” including that the corporate is working to “rearchitect the mind of Alexa with a brand new set of basis fashions.”
Jassy has been on a marketing campaign to chop prices throughout Amazon since late 2022, and the corporate’s units and providers unit, which incorporates Alexa, has been hit by a number of rounds of layoffs. Since its launch in 2014, Alexa has not formed as much as be the cash maker Amazon anticipated.
Whereas tons of of hundreds of thousands of consumers have Alexa-enabled units of their houses, Amazon has struggled to monetize the merchandise. The corporate has historically launched units at extraordinarily low-cost costs with the purpose of selling its different services and products. That concept has not been as profitable as Amazon hoped, and the corporate has misplaced tens of billions of {dollars} on its units enterprise, The Wall Avenue Journal reported.
