Amazon's Upgraded Alexa With AI Smarts Is Coming In October, But Only If You Pay Up

Amazon appears to be readying the launch of a paid subscription service for its smart assistant Alexa in October, according to a report in The Washington Post. While Alexa has been free to use for several years, Amazon has been hard at work adding AI smarts that the company hopes will entice users to move over to a paid plan. However, there will still be a free version of Alexa available after the introduction of this new subscription.

The infusion of AI will bring a bevy of new features to Alexa users who choose to pay up. One of the new features dubbed “Smart Briefing” will summarize news articles Alexa thinks will be of interest to a user. Additionally, Alexa will also be able to help find recipes based on the ingredients available while taking any dietary restrictions into account.


One potential stumbling block for this push to monetize Alexa is the design choice to make the assistant more “charismatic.” Users can look forward to being asked questions such as “Tell me something about what you like to do on the weekends?” as the AI tries to decipher user preferences. This could potentially push away customers who find the questioning odd, or who simply don’t want to converse this way with AI.

The biggest stumbling block, though, will be trying to convince users to pay for Alexa after it has been free for so long. Many will balk at paying the reported $10 a month and stick with the free version when most of their use cases consist of turning lights on and off, asking for the weather, or some other simple automation tasks.

It makes sense for Amazon to take this path, as there are reportedly over 500 million Alexa enabled devices out in the wild. If even a fraction of those customers is converted to the new paid plan, then it should bring in decent amount of revenue. Time will tell just how big of a success this is, though.