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  • ✇Android Authority
  • Alexa’s upcoming generative AI upgrade might cost you $5 to $10 monthlyC. Scott Brown
    Credit: Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority A new report suggests Amazon might charge a monthly fee for an upgraded, generative AI-powered version of Alexa. Allegedly, this monthly charge could be $5 to $10, but there could be a less powerful version that stays free. Amazon considers the current Alexa unprofitable and is losing ground to Google’s and Apple’s offerings. This year, we’ve seen digital assistants get serious AI facelifts. Google is by far the most prominent, with its Gemini
     

Alexa’s upcoming generative AI upgrade might cost you $5 to $10 monthly

21. Červen 2024 v 17:41

Amazon Echo Alexa speaker stock photo (3)

Credit: Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority

  • A new report suggests Amazon might charge a monthly fee for an upgraded, generative AI-powered version of Alexa.
  • Allegedly, this monthly charge could be $5 to $10, but there could be a less powerful version that stays free.
  • Amazon considers the current Alexa unprofitable and is losing ground to Google’s and Apple’s offerings.


This year, we’ve seen digital assistants get serious AI facelifts. Google is by far the most prominent, with its Gemini platform already poised to take over for Google Assistant. Meanwhile, at WWDC24, Apple showed off what a generative AI-powered version of Siri will be able to do later this year.

So far, the major digital assistant platform left out of this conversation is Amazon’s Alexa. Alexa hasn’t had a good couple of years. Amazon considers the platform unprofitable because not enough people use it for what Amazon wants them to use it for, which is buying products on Amazon, naturally. Alexa also doesn’t have the advantage of being baked into your smartphone since the one time Amazon tried to launch a phone was a crash-and-burn failure. This has all culminated with Amazon shrinking the Alexa team and focusing less on it.

But Alexa’s not about to be left behind in the generative AI race. According to a new report from Reuters, Amazon is working hard to bring generative AI-powered Alexa to the masses. Codenamed “Banyan” — a reference to a species of sprawling ficus trees — the “new” Alexa would offer two tiers of service, with the lower tier remaining free and the top tier costing users a monthly fee.

Internally, Amazon is referring to this upgrade as “Remarkable Alexa,” although that is unlikely to be its commercial name. Allegedly, access to “Remarkable Alexa” might cost between $5 and $10 each month. There is not going to be a tie-in with Prime membership, so you won’t get access to the premium tier just by paying for Prime.

According to three current and former Amazon employees speaking anonymously with Reuters, the company has given the Alexa team a hard deadline of August 2024 for the rollout of the “Banyan” project. This would put it nearly a year behind Google’s Gemini announcement and months behind Apple’s Siri announcement. However, if Amazon can actually roll out the new Alexa in August, it might beat Siri’s actual rollout, which likely won’t be completed until early 2025.

Regardless, Amazon’s top brass are calling this a “must-win” situation for the unprofitable Alexa. The team hopes that conversational AI will finally bring Alexa to a profit by allowing users to converse with it about products before making a purchase. However, the people speaking with Reuters admitted that people are too used to using Alexa for free, so paying a monthly fee for it — no matter how useful it might be — isn’t likely to work.

  • ✇Techdirt
  • Oral-B Takes ‘Alexa’ Feature Away From Its Toothbrush Base 4 Years After Selling ThemDark Helmet
    Here we are again, with yet another in our series of posts describing how in these here modern times you simply don’t actually own the things you’ve bought. This sort of thing takes many forms, of course. Sometimes the digital media you “bought” gets disappeared by a platform after a licensing deal runs out. Sometimes the hardware you bought turns into a relatively expensive brick because the company you bought it from decides to stop supporting those devices entirely. And, as Sony made famous w
     

Oral-B Takes ‘Alexa’ Feature Away From Its Toothbrush Base 4 Years After Selling Them

8. Červen 2024 v 04:39

Here we are again, with yet another in our series of posts describing how in these here modern times you simply don’t actually own the things you’ve bought. This sort of thing takes many forms, of course. Sometimes the digital media you “bought” gets disappeared by a platform after a licensing deal runs out. Sometimes the hardware you bought turns into a relatively expensive brick because the company you bought it from decides to stop supporting those devices entirely. And, as Sony made famous with its PlayStation 3, sometimes a company simply decides to disappear a feature that was a selling point on a product on a whim.

Well, that last and oldest example appears to be the most analogous to what Oral-B just did to customers of some of its toothbrushes, which came with a charging base that you could connect to an Amazon Alexa.

That’s what’s happening to some who bought into Oral-B toothbrushes with Amazon Alexa built in. Oral-B released the Guide for $230 in August 2020 but bricked the ability to set up or reconfigure Alexa on the product this February. As of this writing, the Guide is still available through a third-party Amazon seller.

The Guide toothbrush’s charging base was able to connect to the Internet and work like an Alexa speaker that you could speak to and from which Alexa could respond. Owners could “ask to play music, hear the news, check weather, control smart home devices, and even order more brush heads by saying, ‘Alexa, order Oral-B brush head replacements,’” per Procter & Gamble’s 2020 announcement.

And then, in February of this year, Oral-B simply took that feature away. Where there once was an app that you could use to connect the Guide base to your Alexa, that feature in the app is no longer available. For those that had it previously setup with their Alexa, the base will work right up until the point that it drops its internet connection, after which it will no longer connect.

And if you thought refunds would be a thing here, it appears that’s not the case.

That’s a problem for Patrick Hubley, who learned that Oral-B discontinued Connect when his base inadvertently disconnected from the Wi-Fi and he tried using Connect to fix it. He told Ars Technica that when he tries using the Alexa wake word now, the speaker says, “I’m having trouble connecting to the Internet. For help, go to your device’s companion app.”

Hubley attempted but failed to get a refund or replacement brush through Oral-B’s support avenues. He says he will no longer buy Oral-B or Alexa products.

“I only purchased this toothbrush from Amazon because that was the only way to get the water-resistant Alexa speaker that I wanted for the bathroom. … I’m ready to be done with Alexa and Oral-B both.”

This is all starting to sound like the Spotify Car Thing story I linked to in the opener. If history is a guide, perhaps a good bout of public outrage from buyers of the Guide will spur Oral-B to reconsider offering refunds for a product it retroactively decided to make less useful after purchase.

But either way, there really should be some sort of consumer rights associated with not having a product that is purchased suddenly lose features long after purchase. In the meantime, I’ll just have to go back to singing in the shower, I suppose.

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