Amazon announces February event as it races to release new Alexa

Amazon announced Wednesday it will hold a product event on Feb. 26 in New York City, where the company is expected to provide a long-awaited update on its Alexa digital assistant.

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the event will include news from its Alexa team. Panos Panay, Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services, will also be in attendance, according to invites sent to media.

Amazon has been racing to release a new version of its voice-activated Alexa software that has more advanced artificial intelligence capabilities. It’s responding to increased competition in generative AI from rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot, as well as Claude, the chatbot created by AI startup Anthropic, which has raised billions of dollars from Amazon and other investors.

Amazon executives have scheduled a “Go/No-go” meeting for Feb. 14 in preparation for releasing the souped-up Alexa to the public, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The company first previewed a redesigned Alexa in 2023, showing off a live conversation between an Amazon executive and the voice assistant as part of a yet-to-be-released feature called Let’s Chat. Amazon shared few details following that event about further Alexa updates, and it didn’t hold its typical fall event in 2024, at which it typically announces new products.

CNBC reported last year Amazon was preparing to revamp Alexa with AI features, and that it would charge a monthly subscription fee to offset the cost of the technology.

In October, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told investors the new Alexa could launch “in the near future,” adding that the company is working to “rearchitect the brain of Alexa with a new set of foundation models.”

Jassy has been on a campaign to cut costs across Amazon since late 2022, and the company’s devices and services unit, which includes Alexa, has been hit by several rounds of layoffs. Since its launch in 2014, Alexa hasn’t shaped up to be the money maker Amazon anticipated.

While hundreds of millions of customers have Alexa-enabled devices in their homes, Amazon has struggled to monetize the products. The company has traditionally launched devices at extremely cheap prices with the goal of promoting its other products and services. That idea hasn’t been as successful as Amazon hoped, and the company has lost tens of billions of dollars on its devices business, The Wall Street Journal reported.

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