Amazon wants you to start paying for Alexa

More than 75 million people use AlexaBut by Amazon standards, the service is total failure, The problem is that Alexa doesn’t make money and the service represents a huge waste of resources for the company. Apparently, Amazon has a last resort plan to save its digital assistant Supercharging it with AI And it’s charging you for the privilege of using it, but things aren’t looking good.

According to a report inside business information On Thursday, the new mystery Alexa barely works thanks to Mind blowing AI And broken technology. This apparently created political tension within the company, especially because many Amazon employees do not believe that people are willing to pay.

The new service is tentatively called “Alexa Plus” and its launch date is set for June 30, Business Insider reports. It seems that it will be difficult to meet this deadline.

Amazon is testing the underlying technology, stupidly called “Remarkable Alexa,” with 15,000 customers (if you’re one of them, that’s you). Love Talk to you about it). Employees who spoke to BI said testing shows Alexa is both very good at talking and very bad at talking. To do something useful. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The new Alexa gives too long and often incorrect answers, BI said, and struggles with more complex requests that require dealing with multiple services (for example, “play”).paranoid Android“and turns off the lights).

Beyond the classic failings of this generation of artificial intelligence, the new Alexa requires a massive change in both the company’s strategy and the technology going on behind the scenes. Some longtime Alexa employees are not happy about this. According to BI, the team that built the original Alexa doesn’t want to let go of its baby and has forced Amazon to retain parts of the original technology stack, making the new remarkable Alexa bloated and hard to run. Has gone.

Then, there are those who are not convinced about the entire project. The number of services Amazon wants to add to your monthly bill is constantly growing. there is ChiefOf course, but Amazon also powers several streaming services, Audible and others. Employees reportedly told BI that many do not think the company will be able to convince its customers to pay anything other than money to use the smart speaker. They have already paid.

The initiative, which was potentially doomed from the start, is a response to growing pressure to make a splash in the emerging AI business. Google, Apple, and Amazon spent billions of dollars developing smart assistants, a technology that was considered the future of computing. Years later, the project failed to generate significant revenue. Silicon Valley generally looks at Alexa, Google AssistantAnd Sir, I as misguided investments, and the teams working on smart speakers have been particularly affected by layoffs and budget cuts in recent years. The technology industry does not want to let them go by giving them so much importance.

There is now renewed interest in these assistants as a way for consumers to interact with next-generation AI. Amazon and Apple Specifically, they are trying to hold on to that area later Google, Microsoft and OpenAI AI ran away with the hype cycle. Amazon created its own AI models to compete with the chatbots of the world, which is called company Qand apparently also more ambitious models evolve.

Adding AI to digital assistants is no easy task, and if Amazon can do it in a way that even turns Alexa into creator money, it will solve a lot of big headaches. However, if the plan doesn’t work, it could bring Alexa one step closer. to the grave.