Amazon is revamping its Alexa voice assistant as it prepares to launch a new paid subscription plan this year, according to internal documents and people familiar with the matter. But the change is causing internal conflict and may lead to further delay.
Giving something away for free then expecting to make people pay for it is always a winning strategy…
That’s why i stopped using those at all. It’s always the same.
But screw alexa. Why would i even want a bug sending my voice to some random server? And pay for it? Wouldn’t use that thing if they’d pay me…
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At least they don’t try to make you pay for that :-)
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Tentatively called “Alexa Plus,” the paid version of Alexa is intended to offer more conversational and personalized AI technology, said one of the documents obtained by Business Insider.
But the quality of the new Alexa’s answers is still falling short of expectations, often sharing inaccurate information, external tests have found.
Do they really expect people will pay for a large language model making up results on-the-fly?
“If this fails to get revenue, Alexa is in trouble,” one of the people told BI.
I will not shed a tear when Alexa gets shut off, to be honest.
Microsoft is expecting people to pay $20 US per user per month for their Copilot assistant in Windows. They’re all going to crank up the prices for this dubious service.
Considering you can put your own on a raspberry pi for free and run it locally, there isn’t much reason for Alexa anymore anyway
You have a good project you like for that?
Rhasspy. Takes a bit of setup, it’s not as plug and play.
Maybe one day all the human Alexas can have their name back. That would be nice.
Ok, but almost no one got this spywear because they wanted it, they got it because cousin Jerry who they only talk to once a year needed to get them something for Christmas and just went with the trendy tech thing, and it’s just been plugged in in the corner since 2014 siphoning personal data to the big cloud in the sky.
Lol “Pay us to spy on you and monetize your private moments.”
It should be a LOT better if they want to charge for it. I had an echo dot but gave it to a friend because it was really not worth the espionage.
I use HomePod Minis now. Same crappy performance but at least it doesn’t spy on me quite as much.
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Amazon is revamping its Alexa voice assistant as it prepares to launch a new paid subscription plan this year, according to internal documents and people familiar with the matter.
Despite its early success in becoming a household name, Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant has struggled to build a feasible business model, leading to major layoffs and cost cutting measures over the past year.
The new subscription plan, which will be backed by a superpowered version of Alexa, represents Amazon’s latest attempt to revive the voice technology that was once considered the key to its future.
Amazon’s former hardware and devices boss, Dave Limp, also said that the company will have to start charging for the more advanced version of Alexa at some point, given the high cost of running AI models.
A limited preview with 15,000 external customers discovered that while Remarkable Alexa is generally good at being conversational and informative, it is still deflecting answers, often giving unnecessarily long or inaccurate responses, the people said.
Last year, Amazon also created a new general artificial intelligence team that’s working on its “most ambitious” and “most expansive” large language models, BI previously reported.
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Does this subscription come with ads?
Edit: Added a link
