This week, Amazon sent out invites to an upcoming occasion hosted by Amazon Senior Vice President Panos Panay and the Amazon Devices & Services group in New York City on February 26. As may be seen inside the picture above, the invite Digital Trends acquired had the signature Amazon swoop with “Hi there.” the front and middle, and the date toward the lowest, all on top of a shaded blue historical past that included what on the floor gave the look of some attractive, curved layout factors.
Sure, the layout gave off a feeling of Amazon Alexa, however beyond hypothesis around what the event might be about, the innocuous e mail didn’t appear to expose any useful information. That is, until The Verge did some spectacular sleuthing and determined that there wasn’t one e mail invite despatched out, but five. That appealing, curved historical past turned into in reality part of some cursive textual content that, when all five invitation had been put together, spelled out “alexa.” Pretty strong confirmation to those Alexa feels.
According to statistics received by using Reuters, the event will announce the launch of a brand new generative AI-powered Alexa, but the quantity of the features is as but unknown. While the expectancy is that the new provider may be rolled out to a restricted variety of users free of rate, something that has apparently been floated internally via Amazon is such as a $5-10 subscription fee for the brand new AI-powered Alexa. The modern-day model — known as Classic Alexa — will continue to be available at no rate, although improvement of new functions for Classic Alexa has reportedly ceased.
Amazon has been tremendously in the back of the curve for the past couple years in relation to generative AI integration, with an LLM assertion lower back in 2023 that hasn’t absolutely materialized but. But thinking about the quantity of Amazon devices — including the Echo speaker and Omni Fire TV — in average families, it’s crucial that they trap up. The large query round this capacity new carrier and its integration is how it’ll separate and stick out from the string of generative AI fashions that have pop out within the beyond couple years.
