Amazon’s plan to charge for its AI chatbot could happen as early as next year. The company has talked about the need to monetise Alexa which requires heavy investment and hardware to run and manage building AI applications for these systems.
The company was reportedly looking to introduce the paid Alexa for consumers in June this year, but reports say that concerns at Amazon have led to the launch being delayed to 2025. The company is expected to call it Alexa Plus and it is assumed to work in a similar way to ChatGPT Plus and Copilot Pro from Microsoft.
Amazon is giving people a more personalised AI product but that undoubtedly won’t be free. The company talked about its long game in the large language models (LLMs) arena in the coming years which was previewed with an Alexa that gave more human-like responses. It is remarkable to see the push for AI jump from all corners, and companies even feel tempted to go for a paid model using these tools for consumers.
It does make sense when you are targeting businesses that need more data resources and applications support to run their operations, but for a regular user these AI features need to evolve and become polished to be even considered for a paid model. Amazon did showcase some of its paid services at the event, which includes the emergency alerts that work through the Echo speakers but its purpose is still a novelty for most people.
It is likely that the internal concerns range around these issues and probably by next year, companies like Amazon will have a better hold in the field and enough ammunition to compete with the best in the market.
AI is definitely the talk of the industry and for good or worse, it is likely to shape these companies in the near future.
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