Possibility of Charging for Amazon’s Alexa AI Services in the Future
Amazon showcased its AI lineup at the Devices event this week, but it goes without saying that Generative AI was a hot word throughout the keynote. The company is understandably working through Alexa on new solutions with artificial intelligence for consumer needs.
And it has been suggested that Amazon could eventually decide to charge for its Alexa AI assistant in the coming years. Amazon hasn’t directly talked about its future plans, but outgoing CEO Dave Limp hinted in an interview with Bloomberg about the possibility of Alexa becoming a paid feature.
AI applications cost money to build, and tech companies realize that they need to invest heavily to make these machine learning models successful and useful to consumers. And that cost is likely included in the value the consumer pays to acquire the device and service.
It’s not clear how Amazon would justify paying for Alexa to its customers, especially since its competitors can offer similar apps for free. However, the strategy of getting people to pay for Alexa could be another way for the company to monetize a business that has primarily relied on money spent by developers to develop Alexa’s skills.
With generative AI at the forefront of the industry, developers could closely watch companies like Amazon and Google and how they choose to operate and connect with the community to create apps with real-life use cases. At the event, Amazon introduced some of its paid services, which include emergency notifications via Echo speakers.
So how soon can you expect superhuman Alexa AI to be available in the market? As we said, the company hasn’t officially shared plans for such a service, and definitely hasn’t mentioned the fact that Alexa will eventually become a paid service.
To be fair, they don’t even have a defined pricing tier, which could hint that availability could be sooner than we imagine. Even so, now that we know the company has thought in this direction, it’s better to keep a close eye on how Alexa’s next chapter develops in the coming years.
