Amazon Alexa To Get Long-awaited Ai Overhaul

Once released, it would mark the most significant upgrade to the product since its initial introduction accelerated a wave of digital assistants more than a decade ago.

Amazon on Wednesday sent press invites to an event to be held on 26 February in New York featuring the head of its devices and services team, Panos Panay. A spokesman said the event is Alexa-focused, while declining to elaborate.

The new generative AI-powered Alexa represents at once a huge opportunity for Amazon, which counts more than half a billion Alexa-enabled devices in the market, as well as a tremendous risk. Amazon is hoping the revamp, designed to be able to converse with users, can convert some of its hundreds of millions of users into paying customers in an effort to generate a return for the unprofitable business.

The AI service will be able to respond to multiple prompts in sequence and, company executives have said, even act as an "agent" on behalf of users by taking actions for them without their direct involvement. That contrasts with the current iteration, which generally handles only a single request at a time.

Alexa is the brainchild of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who envisioned a service that would resemble the voice-activated computers on Star Trek. The hope was that once perfected, users would turn to the voice assistant for hundreds of everyday tasks like turning on lights, preheating the oven, accessing the internet, playing music, writing e-mails and summoning taxis.