Amazon is working on a new paid subscription plan for its Alexa voice assistant.The new plan would use an upgraded, AI-powered version of Alexa.Amazon is not satisfied by the new Alexa’s performance internally.

Amazon is revamping its Alexa voice assistant as it prepares to launch a new paid subscription plan this year, according to internal documents and people familiar with the matter. But the change is causing internal conflict and may lead to further delay.

Tentatively called « Alexa Plus, » the paid version of Alexa is intended to offer more conversational and personalized AI technology, said one of the documents obtained by Business Insider. The team is working towards a June 30 launch deadline, and has been testing the underlying voice technology, dubbed « Remarkable Alexa, » with 15,000 external customers, these people said.

But the quality of the new Alexa’s answers is still falling short of expectations, often sharing inaccurate information, external tests have found. Amazon is now going through a major overhaul of Alexa’s technology stack to address this issue, though the team is experiencing some discord. The people who spoke to BI requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. Their identities are known to BI.

Despite its early success in becoming a household name, Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant has struggled to build a feasible business model, leading to major layoffs and cost cutting measures over the past year. The new subscription plan, which will be backed by a superpowered version of Alexa, represents Amazon’s latest attempt to revive the voice technology that was once considered the key to its future.

« If this fails to get revenue, Alexa is in trouble, » one of the people told BI.

Amazon declined comment.

‘Doesn’t meet the quality standards’

For Alexa, the change comes at a critical moment, as the voice assistant has fallen behind competitors like Google and Apple in recent years. In the US, Google Assistant is on pace to have 88.8 million users this year, followed by Apple Siri’s 84.2 million, according to Insider Intelligence. Alexa is the third-largest, with 75.6 million users.

Some parts of the new AI-powered Alexa were showcased during Amazon’s hardware event last year. Amazon’s former hardware and devices boss, Dave Limp, also said that the company will have to start charging for the more advanced version of Alexa at some point, given the high cost of running AI models.

Internally, however, Amazon isn’t satisfied with the performance of the new Remarkable Alexa yet.

A limited preview with 15,000 external customers discovered that while Remarkable Alexa is generally good at being conversational and informative, it is still deflecting answers, often giving unnecessarily long or inaccurate responses, the people said. It also needs to improve its ability to answer ambiguous customer requests that require the engagement of multiple services, like turning on the light and music at the same time.

The new Alexa still does not meet the quality standards expected for Alexa Plus, these people added, noting the technical challenges and complexity in redesigning Alexa.

One way Amazon is addressing this issue is by completely revamping Alexa’s technology stack, these people said.

The old Alexa, internally dubbed « Classic Alexa, » was based on a natural language model that kept context history and personalization signals distributed across different parts. But the new Remarkable Alexa follows a more centralized structure, where language understanding and response generation use a single language model. That enables better reasoning over a complex set of data and interaction history, delivering a much more personalized experience, they said.

Amazon’s decision to move to a new technology stack for Alexa is largely because of the « legacy constraints » that come with Classic Alexa, one of the people said.

Growing tension

There’s also growing debate over the direction of the project.

The Classic Alexa team, for example, wants to protect their work by insisting on using what they built for the old Alexa, one of the people said. That, in turn, is resulting in a more bloated technology stack, while creating internal politics for the team, this person said.

Meanwhile, some are questioning the entire premise of charging for Alexa, another person said. For example, people who already pay for an existing Amazon service, like Amazon Music, may not be willing to pay additional money to get access to the newer version of Alexa, this person said.

« There is tension over whether people will pay for Alexa or not, » one of the people said.

Amazon expects the new Alexa to be able to do everything the older version of Alexa does well, while improving upon some of its deficiencies, like completing tasks that involve multiple applications, the people said. Accurate and coherent conversational features will serve as key differentiators, they added.

In addition to the subscription-based Alexa, Amazon is also working on a new Alexa product that can be used within a web browser, people familiar with the project told BI. The new Alexa is based on an internal language model called Olympus, these people said. Reuters and The Information previously reported on the existence of the Olympus model.

Last year, Amazon also created a new general artificial intelligence team that’s working on its « most ambitious » and « most expansive » large language models, BI previously reported. That team recently went through a major reorganization that included some job cuts, and is now focused on 6 key areas, BI previously reported.

At the time, Amazon’s head scientist and SVP Rohit Prasad, who runs the new AGI team, wrote to employees that their overarching mission is to « build world-class general purpose intelligence services that benefit every Amazon business and humanity. »

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