Amazon is hosting a launch event on Tuesday where it’s expected to unveil significant updates to its devices lineup.
The event is slated to kick off at 10 a.m. ET and will feature announcements from Panos Panay, who oversees Amazon’s sprawling devices and services business.
Invites sent to the media and analysts earlier this month showed what appeared to be an Echo smart speaker, Fire TV, Ring doorbell button and a Kindle e-reader, suggesting what could be in store at the event.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a Bloomberg TV interview earlier this year that a “brand new lineup of devices” compatible with Alexa+ would be coming this fall.
Reviews for the company’s upgraded assistant, which is powered by generative artificial intelligence, have been mixed.
Ohio resident and IT manager Jeff Finlay, 61, got access to Alexa+ in late June after applying to the beta program in March. Finlay, who has seven Echo devices in his home, said he feels Alexa+ has “worsened some of the functions I was used to using it for.”
He said Alexa+’s weather forecasts don’t seem to be as informative as previous iterations offered through the original Alexa assistant, called Big Sky.
Wired wrote in July that the new Alexa seems to be a more skilled and natural conversationalist, which “is a relief after years of Alexa’s robotic tones.” But TechCrunch noted in August that the service was prone to making mistakes and stumbled on some requests, making it seem “very much like a beta product.”
Amazon typically hosts an annual devices bonanza each fall, where it unveils a bevy of new hardware and software products.
The company eschewed the tradition in 2024 and instead hosted an event last February where it announced a long-awaited overhaul of its Alexa digital assistant.
Since then, Amazon has slowly rolled out early access to Alexa+. It’s not yet available to the general public and users must have newer versions of Amazon’s Echo Show, its voice-controlled display with a touch screen.
The company says more than a million users have been granted access to Alexa+.
In a first for Amazon, the company is charging users to access its digital assistant, which it says is more conversational and proactive compared with previous versions. The service costs $19.99 a month, but is free for members of its $139-a-year Prime program.
Alexa has grown to be a sizable business for Amazon, with more than 600 million Alexa devices sold worldwide. That figure includes third-party products, as well as Amazon-branded devices.
Amazon faces growing pressure to update its hardware and software for the generative AI age following the success of rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Meta also has its Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which use its Llama large language model to answer spoken questions from the user.
Amazon’s AI device ambitions may not end with Alexa or Echo smart speakers.
The company in July confirmed it’s acquiring AI wearables startup Bee, which makes a wristband that can record and transcribe conversations.
Amazon has also introduced generative AI in some of its Ring smart home security products.
|
300x180 AD