- Amazon invites literally spell out ‘Alexa’ teasing a major update
- The new Alexa could be an autonomous AI agent…
- … but it might also cost you $5-$10 a month
Amazon sent out invites to a big product launch event in New York City yesterday that contained plenty of Alexa hints (including a familiar shade of blue). And now some details hidden in the invite, plus some fresh rumors, have given us a clearer idea of what to expect on February 26.
We missed the first Alexa AI hint because it’s impossible to spot when looking at a single invite. But take one of each of the five different invite styles Amazon distributed and you’ll see they spell “alexa” – with our odd-looking ‘a’ actually being an ‘e’. The puzzle was cracked by The Verge.
This means that Amazon is all-but-guaranteed to to show off the long-awaited, next-gen Alexa that we’ve been waiting for on February 26 – and we might even see some new hardware for this AI to call home.
We’ve also now got some potential details on exactly what Alexa AI will do. According to Reuters – which cites three people familiar with the project – the new and improved Alexa assistant will have a few key upgrades.
Firstly, it’ll seemingly be better at understanding natural speech and the context of your requests as the new AI will be able to respond to multiple prompts in a sequence.
We’re not sure precisely how this will look, but we’re imagining a cooking environment where you quickly ask Alexa to start a timer for 30 minutes, plus a recipe to prepare the next part of your meal, and for it to play a relaxing playlist to help you handle the pressure a little more easily. Rather than saying ‘Hey Alexa’ between each prompt, you could just ask them back-to-back like you can with a service like Gemini Live.
Next, it’s said that Alexa will be able to serve as an AI agent – meaning it can perform tasks on behalf of users without needing their direct involvement. Again, it’s not clear what form this will take, but perhaps Alexa will learn your routines and automatically turn off smart lights if it knows you aren’t home. That said, we’re a little timid about Alexa being able to act autonomously – without the right protections, an Agent with access to our credit card and the world’s biggest online marketplace sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Lastly, while Alexa’s AI upgrade will seemingly be free with limited usage at first, Amazon has reportedly floated the idea of charging $5-$10 a month for it (probably around £5-£10 / AU$8-AU$16). Thankfully, classic Alexa could remain as an always available free option.
Will Alexa AI be worth paying for?
Based on the leaks so far, we aren’t convinced that Alexa AI will be useful enough to justify paying for. It doesn’t sound quite significant enough to tempt people who only use it as a voice-activated timer and light switch, but Amazon could give us more compelling reasons when February 26 rolls around.
You might have missed it in the buzz caused by the likes of ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Apple Intelligence and DeepSeek, but Alexa has been surprisingly absent from the AI revolution. The smart speaker assistant once synonymous with at-home AI now feels decidedly dumb as it struggles to engage in natural conversation with the same fluidity as Gemini Live, and with answers to queries that contain far less depth than the likes of GPT-4o.
This is apparently not through lack of trying. Reports have suggested that “technical challenges” have held Alexa’s next-gen upgrade back as it struggled with frequent hallucinations (when an AI makes up information, or makes a mistake) as well as continuing to perform the basic smart home tasks Alexa can do right now (such as turning on smart lights).
These snags apparently set the AI’s release date back to 2025, but it appears Amazon is finally ready to make its efforts public.
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