We’ve been waiting almost a year for Amazon‘s AI reboot of Alexa, and some new leaked documents suggest the upgraded voice assistant is finally going to launch soon, with some new talents.
The Washington Post says it’s obtained some “internal documents” that reveal some of Alexa AI’s new features, alongside a likely “mid-October” launch date. The new voice assistant will apparently also cost “as much as $10 a month”, with today’s version of Alexa remaining free and being rebranded as “classic Alexa”.
That pricing apparently isn’t yet final, with Amazon apparently planning to “make decisions on pricing, subscription structure and the product name” this month, according to documents seen by the Post.
But it does now look highly likely that Amazon is planning to tempt us into another monthly subscription for its conversational voice assistant, which it first teased back in September 2023. Since then, Amazon has launched its AI-powered Rufus shopping assistant, and also quietly “integrated generative AI into different components of Alexa”, as it told us in July.
What will the new Alexa AI be able to do? Here are five features that are coming to tempt you into a subscription, according to those leaked documents.
1. Smart Briefing
Amazon appears to be keen to launch its AI-powered Alexa before the US Presidential election, and for good reason – one of its key features will apparently be a new ‘Smart Briefing’ feature.
According to the leaked documents, these will give you “daily, AI-generated summaries of news articles” that are “selected based on a customer’s preferences”. This would be quite an upgrade on the existing Alexa, which doesn’t handle political questions particularly well – and Amazon will clearly need to be confident in the accuracy of Alexa’s replies in such an important year.
Still, this is apparently a highly-requested feature, with Amazon’s documents stating “AI features that help customers curate, summarize, and explore current events was also rated as one of the top customer requests.”
2. More personalized responses
The leaked Amazon documents suggest that the new AI-powered Alexa will “feel more conversational and charismatic” and will “learn to recognize the individual voices of new customers and ask people questions about themselves so as to be more helpful later”, according to The Washington Post.
It’s already possible to set up a Voice ID with today’s Alexa and get personalized responses, so that particular feature isn’t new. But the suggestion is that Alexa AI will learn about different users by asking (mildly creepy) questions like ‘tell me something about what you like to do on the weekends?’.
Apparently, you’ll even be able to tell the voice assistant about your family’s dietary requirements, and it’ll bear those in mind when generating recipe suggestions. Exactly how or where this information will be stored isn’t clear, but it certainly sounds useful as long as you’re happy with the privacy trade-off. And talking of recipes…
3. Cooking help
The leaked Amazon documents apparently contain the observation that “food assistance was ranked one of the top 3 areas where customers want more help from AI enabled assistance”. So helping you find recipes will apparently be another key focus for the new Alexa AI.
There isn’t any more detail on exactly how this will be achieved. Has the new Alexa been trained on licensed recipes from the likes of BBC Good Food? We don’t yet know, but we hope it doesn’t ‘hallucinate’ – that is, make stuff up – too much; we don’t want to end up making a fish omelette or recreating a horrendous TikTok abomination.
It wouldn’t been an Amazon AI assistant if shopping wasn’t at the forefront of its silicon mind – and helping you find new impulse buys is apparently going to be another focus of Alexa AI.
According to the leaked documents, you’ll be able to ask it questions like “do you have any deals on headphones?” or “what colors do the shoes come in?”. Even better, a new product called Shopping Scout will apparently let you know when something you’re looking to buy has just gone on sale.
That could be handy during the Black Friday deals event, although given that those deals are sometimes questionable, you’ll still want to corroborate the results with tech experts like, for example, TechRadar. You’ll also want to keep an eye on your Amazon subscriptions, as that feature is apparently designed to help drive those.
5. An AI assistant for kids
This one will likely prove the most controversial of Alexa AI’s new powers. According to The Washington Post’s report, Amazon hopes its rebooted shopping assistant will “prove compelling to children”.
The leaked documents suggest that a new experience called ‘Explore with Alexa 2.0’ will let verified children have “back-and-forth, exploratory conversations with Alexa about any topic under the sun”.
While Amazon seemingly claims that this experience will be “safe and moderated”, there has previously been some controversy around whether smart speakers are really safe for children.
The weaknesses of AI-powered assistants, all of which are capable of hallucinating to some degree, could only exacerbate that, but we’ll reserve judgement until we see Amazon’s new Alexa AI assistant launch – seemingly sometime in mid-October.
