Amazon is renewing Alexa, with the intention of launching a new paid subscription plan. However, the project in question called “Alexa More” is facing numerous technical obstacles and internal conflicts, which could cause further delays. While Amazon's voice assistant has become a household name, it is struggling to build a sustainable business model, facing staff cuts and cost-cutting measures.
What is Amazon Alexa Plus and why are there obstacles in moving forward with the project
The new version of Alexa, with the addition of advanced AI technologies, represents a crucial attempt to revive Amazon's voice technology. According to internal documents and sources close to the project, the goal of Alexa Plus is to offer a more experience conversational and personalized, taking advantage of the new capabilities of artificial intelligence. Despite intense work and a deadline set at 30nd June, the quality of the answers provided by the new Alexa does not yet meet the expected standards, raising internal concerns and criticism.
This new version of Alexa, dubbed in the documents “Remarkable Alexa", has been tested with 15.000 customers external. While generally good at conversing and providing information, “Remarkable Alexa” showed limits in managing ambiguous responses and complex customer requests. This led Amazon to a major overhaul of the technology behind Alexa, facing technical challenges and complexities in redesigning the voice assistant.
The older version of Alexa, defined internally “Classic Alexa“, was based on a natural language model with context history and personalization signals distributed in different parts. In contrast, “Remarkable Alexa” adopts a more centralized structure, using a single language model for understanding and generating responses. This should allow a better reasoning on a more complex data set offering a much more personalized experience.
Despite these technological advances, internal tensions exist regarding the direction of Alexa Plus. Some members of the “Classic Alexa" they want to protect their jobs, insisting on the use of technologies developed for the old version of Alexa. This has led to technological overload and internal conflicts. Furthermore, doubts arise about the feasibility of a model paid subscription for Alexa, considering the reluctance of users already subscribed to Amazon services to pay additionally for the new version of Alexa.
In this regard, we remind you that theAmazon Prime subscription increased also in Italy, albeit with options to amortize the costs of the services it provides. Prime Video with advertising, included in the classic Prime subscription, includes a lower cost as long as the user sees advertising when you stream.
In parallel with the subscription-based plan, Amazon is working on a new one Alexa product usable via web browser. This product is based on an internal language model called Olympus.
