The service will be available in March to some users, with the rollout expanding to more people over time
The event marked the unveiling of a secret project known internally as "Banyan" aimed at making Alexa more conversational. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can learn from data and improve over time.
Following the company's presentation, Amazon executives presented different capabilities of the service like using it for food ordering, smart home connections and video streaming. But it did not permit media to test the service themselves.
Some who worked on the service had told Reuters that it occasionally provided incorrect answers to user questions or lagged for several seconds before completing a prompt. During the demonstration Wednesday, Panay and other executives had to ask more than once on a few occasions to have the Alexa service respond.
While Amazon's Alexa was launched three years after Apple's Siri hit the iPhone maker's devices, Alexa helped make the use of voice assistants more mainstream. Still, the lack of solid improvements and overhauls to Alexa over the years meant an erosion in consumer usage of the service, especially in the age of AI.
Apple has already incorporated its suite of AI features, dubbed Apple Intelligence, into its Siri voice assistant, while Google has revamped its voice assistant using its AI chatbot Gemini.
Alexa is voice-controlled software installed in products such as smart speakers that can provide answers to user questions, play music, set timers and serve as a hub for home automation, by linking internet-connected devices so that, for instance, a light can be turned on with just voice prompts.
The new Alexa AI service will be able to respond to multiple prompts in sequence and even act as an "agent" by taking actions for users without their direct involvement. That contrasts with the current iteration which generally handles only a single request at a time.
Amazon has said there are some 500 million Alexa-capable devices in consumer hands already, meaning the revamp is at once a huge money-making opportunity for the Seattle retailer - and a big financial risk if it does not live up to expectations.
Amazon said Alexa+ will use the best AI model available for a given task using Bedrock, Amazon's grab bag of AI services to allow for experimentation.
But Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Echo, acknowledged AI startup Anthropic's contribution to building Alexa+, confirming a Reuters story that Anthropic's Claude was an underpinning of the service.
Amazon has invested $8 billion in Anthropic.
