Amazon poised to start charging monthly fee for Alexa
Amazon is preparing to charge customers up to $10 (£7.91) a month to use Alexa, as the tech giant seeks to make the digital voice assistant profitable.
Details of the proposed charge have emerged as the retailer prepares to add an AI-powered feature to the service, which has been losing money since it was launched a decade ago.
This will coincide with potentially renaming the tool “Remarkable Alexa”, Reuters reported, which will be able to deal with more complicated queries and offer a genuine rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
However, Amazon is reportedly considering a charge of between $5 and $10 to use the service.
Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, has said the company is developing a “more intelligent and capable Alexa” as it seeks to reignite interest in the voice assistant, which it first rolled out in 2014.
The voice assistant has been embedded into Amazon’s Echo smart speakers, alarm clocks and thousands of other electronic gadgets.
However, Amazon’s hopes that people would one day use the digital assistant to buy items using only their voice have largely failed to take off.
Instead, users mostly turn to Alexa for simple tasks, such as asking it to play music or checking the weather.
While Amazon is likely to keep a more basic version of Alexa free, bosses have already signalled that it will consider charging for an advanced model.
David Limp, who previously headed up Amazon’s devices division, said: “We will end up charging something for it down the road.”
The need to rework Alexa has been given added focus by the launch of ChatGPT, the AI chatbot developed by OpenAI.
ChatGPT is able to compose emails or engage in human-like conversations.
This has led to Amazon’s rivals, including Google, racing to add a new generation of AI products to their software and gadgets.
Amazon has already added a more advanced digital assistant called Rufus to its online store, which can provide shoppers with instant advice.
Sources told Reuters that 2024 was seen as a “must-win” year for the Alexa team.
An Amazon spokesman said: “Our vision for Alexa remains the same – to build the world’s best personal assistant. Generative AI offers a huge opportunity to make Alexa even better for our customers.”
