Amazon’s highly anticipated AI upgrade for Alexa is set to launch in October, but it won’t be free, according to internal documents obtained The Washington Postwhich revealed the tech giant’s plans to launch a subscription-based version of its voice assistant, packed with new AI-powered features.

The revamped Alexa, dubbed “Remarkable Alexa” or “Project Banyan,” could come with a monthly fee of between $5 and $10 – independent of Prime memberships, the newspaper reported. But don’t panic – the “classic,” free version will remain.

The Washington Post says the new AI-powered Alexa promises more human conversations. It recognizes individual voices, asks personal questions and uses that information to tailor its responses. For example, Alexa can make better suggestions for a weekend activity based on your past chats, so it won’t recommend hiking to people who hate field trips.

The report also highlights other features, such as daily news summaries, finding recipes that suit your eating habits, and even a specific tone for interacting with children (with parental controls, of course). This is all part of Amazon’s plan to keep users engaged with Alexa and squeeze some profit from the previously unprofitable home assistant.

For shopaholics, the improved Alexa will answer detailed product questions, check for deals, and even notify the user when the desired item goes on sale. post noticed. Amazon is betting that these features will increase both subscriptions and overall revenue.

This AI overhaul has been in the works for over a year, a response to the ChatGPT revolution that pushed tech companies to boost their AI performance. In September 2023, Decrypt reported that Amazon has begun work on an advanced LLM to power its Alexa hardware suite.

“To our knowledge, this is the largest integration of an LLM, real-time services, and a range of devices – and it’s not limited to a tab in a browser,” Amazon said at the time. “And we’re just getting started – with generative AI, we can also improve a number of core components of the Alexa experience.”

The effort to create a new proprietary language model came after a partnership between Amazon and Anthropic (developer of Claude AI) was announced. Amazon began training its LLM using a huge corpus of data that Amazon collected through its interactions with all Alexa users. After some controversy, the company clarified that there is an option to opt out and still use all the features offered by Amazon.

“(Amazon) has always believed that training Alexa with real-world queries is essential to providing customers with a precise and personalized experience that is constantly improving,” an Amazon spokesperson said. Decrypt“But at the same time, we give customers control over whether their Alexa voice recordings are used to improve the service, and we always take our customers’ preferences into account when training our models.”

In November 2023, Amazon launched Q, an AI-powered assistant for business applications. This release marked Amazon’s entry into the enterprise AI assistant market, competing directly with established offerings such as ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot.