Amazon Wants You To Pay Rs 800 Per Month For Its GenAI Alexa Upgrade But Should You?

Amazon is going ahead with its plans to charge a monthly fee for its new-gen Alexa AI version. At least that’s what reports are saying. The company walked us through its GenAI tools and more personalised Alexa at an event in September 2023, but almost one year since that demo, Amazon is still putting the final touches to its release plans.

The latest development suggests Amazon is planning to charge up to $10 (Rs 830 approx) per month for those who want to use the new Alexa assistant. It is interesting to see the company start the premium model from day one with its AI launch, which could be a tricky move since most people are still waiting to see if those Alexa demos have come to the final version or not.

The report from Reuters says Amazon will be calling this premium tier as Remarkable Alexa, but very little is known about the features that the GenAI avatar of Alexa will offer and how it will compare against OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4o, Microsoft Copilot and even Google’s Gemini AI chatbots.

Starting On A Bold Note

The September 2023 event showed us a conversational version of Alexa that should have rolled out to millions of Echo speakers from the company. But it’s almost 12 months since that big event was hosted by Amazon and still we don’t see any signs of the Gen AI Alexa avatar releasing to the public. Instead, Amazon seems to be going bold with a subscription charge to use its AI features.

Amazon’s struggle with its AI advancement has been largely pointed towards the lack of data and also the high-end computing system that are needed to run these large language models or LLMs. These two form the fulcrum of succeeding with AI models and Amazon doesn’t have either of them, which explains why the conversational Alexa hasn’t made the breakthrough.

A recent report has talked about Amazon’s split priorities with its AI development, where some of the executives want its cloud business to get the upgrades, while keeping Alexa on the backburner. Companies tend to start with the free model so that more people sign up and provide the room for the AI chatbots to evolve and learn further.

Charging Rs 800 per month for the AI version of Alexa means it needs to be convincing, accurate (almost) and intuitive to even become a choice among the host of free AI chatbots out there. We don’t even know what happens in markets like India if Amazon decides to charge them a premium for this version.