{"id":247445,"date":"2025-02-26T19:47:54","date_gmt":"2025-02-26T19:47:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/26\/alexa-relaunched-with-ambition-to-be-your-best-digital-friend\/"},"modified":"2025-02-26T19:47:54","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T19:47:54","slug":"alexa-relaunched-with-ambition-to-be-your-best-digital-friend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/26\/alexa-relaunched-with-ambition-to-be-your-best-digital-friend\/","title":{"rendered":"Alexa relaunched with ambition to be ‘your best digital friend’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Alexa<\/div>


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Tom Gerken<\/span><\/p>\n

Technology reporter<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"AmazonAmazon<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Amazon told the BBC Alexa+ will be available on the “overwhelming majority” of its Echo devices <\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
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Amazon has unveiled Alexa+, an overhauled version of its virtual assistant with which it hopes users will share “just about anything”.<\/p>\n

Rapid recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have caused huge growth in software capable of natural-sounding conversations, with ChatGPT and DeepSeek among the most-downloaded apps worldwide.<\/p>\n

Amazon is attempting to tap into this, with Alexa+ telling a launch event in New York it wanted to be “your new best friend in the digital world”.<\/p>\n

It will be included for free in Prime subscriptions when it launches from March – but to non-members it will cost $19.99 (\u00a316) per month, with the UK price yet to be announced.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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However experts have suggested consumers may struggle to get past their limited expectations of Amazon devices.<\/p>\n

“Smart speakers are found in one in four UK homes, yet many users treat them as nothing more than expensive kitchen timers,” said Ed Freed from marketing agency Rapp UK. <\/p>\n

“Ultimately, the most logical place for a truly personal AI assistant is on your phone, not on your countertop.”<\/p>\n

Amazon’s head of devices and services Panos Panay said Alexa+ would remember information, meaning if you tell it you’re a gluten intolerant vegan, for example, future recipes it suggested would bear this in mind.<\/p>\n

And he promised there would be “no more Alexa speak” – meaning users will be able to speak to it more conversationally than previously possible.<\/p>\n

These are new features that Dr Richard Whittle of University of Salford’s Business School explained were “long overdue”.<\/p>\n

“Amazon is hoping its upgraded Alexa will challenge Copilot, Google Assistant and Siri, all of whom use new LLM (large language model) technology,” he said.<\/p>\n

“When users can now chat naturally to their AI assistants, Alexa’s once leading voice interaction seems narrow and rigid.”<\/p>\n

His colleague Dr Gordon Fletcher, associate dean of research and innovation, agreed.<\/p>\n

“Technology changes more rapidly now, competing AI models get updated and everyone else scrambles to respond, Grok last week, Claude this week,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Alexa and the Echo hardware have increasingly seemed like an ageing relic, slow to shift and always behind the curve.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

A change of strategy<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
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Amazon told the BBC Alexa+ would be available in all countries which currently have Alexa.<\/p>\n

In the US, it will be available from March, with other countries getting it later in 2025.<\/p>\n

It will be available on devices as far back as the second generation Echo Dot, which launched in 2017.<\/p>\n

For its devices with screens, it will be available as far back as the first generation Echo Show 8, which launched in 2019.<\/p>\n

It is clear that Amazon expects Alexa+ to do more than its predecessor – and know much more about its users’ lives.<\/p>\n

Mara Segal, director of Alexa, said people will now be able to share “just about anything” with the virtual assistant – the idea being that by sharing emails and photographs, it will be able to search through them for things you request.<\/p>\n

Other demonstrations included using it to book a taxi and a dinner reservation at a restaurant.<\/p>\n

Thomas Husson, principal analyst at Forrester, said the relaunch was a tacit admission by Amazon that its original vision for smart speakers had failed.<\/p>\n

“By subsidising hundreds of millions of Echo connected speakers, Alexa managed to enter households in the hope of generating incremental e-commerce sales,” he said. <\/p>\n

“This strategy failed and the company invested $25 billion (\u00a320bn) in its Alexa division, without truly revolutionizing smart homes.”<\/p>\n

He said it was “about time” Amazon created a “truly smart and useful assistant”. <\/p>\n

But he warned that to “truly differentiate” itself, Alexa would need to distinguish between personal and household data, which “equals a big privacy and trust hurdle”.<\/p>\n

And Dr Stuart Millar, lead AI engineer at Rapid7, said the move “makes sense” as Alexa has “lagged behind” competitors such as ChatGPT – but warned the real test will be when regular people get their hands on it.<\/p>\n

“We’ve seen big tech companies launch ambitious AI features before, only to backtrack when unexpected issues arise, or it hasn’t behaved as expected,” he said. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n


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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Gerken Technology reporter Amazon Amazon told the BBC Alexa+ will be available on the “overwhelming majority” of its Echo devices Amazon has unveiled Alexa+, an overhauled version of its virtual assistant with which it hopes users will share “just about anything”. Rapid recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have caused huge growth in software […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":247446,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/bbcx\/grey-placeholder.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[604],"tags":[25624,30091,247,8670,191831],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247445"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247445"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":247447,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247445\/revisions\/247447"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}