Amazon has sent out invites for an Alexa event in February. It's expected that we'll see the launch of new Alexa.
The next-gen Alexa is expected to be a more advanced AI service, offering more conversational responses, but could come with a subscription fee.
Amazon has sent out invites for an event that it’s hosting on 26 February. The cryptic invites don’t give away much at first glance, but it’s clear that Alexa is on the agenda for the event, which is to be held in New York City.
There are a couple of details that point to Alexa – the most notable being the colours used for the invitation. Alexa classically uses blue to indicate when it is listening and that’s what we see in the invitation.
And a little detective work from The Verge has taken this further. By piecing together five different versions of the invite, they can be seen to spell out “Alexa”. That puts that line of speculation to bed, at least.
The event will be hosted by Panos Panay, who stepped into the role as head of the Amazon devices and services team a couple of years back, replacing Dave Limp. So far we’ve not heard too much from Panay – formerly of Microsoft and one of the drivers behind the Surface line of devices.
The only thing we’ve really heard from Panay so far is when he relaunched the Kindle devices in October 2024, so this is shaping up to be a big launch for Amazon.
What will Amazon announce at its February event?
In 2023, Amazon teased its next generation of Alexa. While the company was launching the Echo Show 8 and other devices, it also showed off an Alexa that was smarter, more conversational and using more enhanced language models.
But since it showcased the next generation of Alexa, a lot has happened in the AI space – ChatGPT has really exploded in the consumer space, Google has given us Gemini and rolled it into a number of devices, and Siri has been boosted with Apple Intelligence. If anything, Alexa is now a little behind the times with its conversational AI offering.
However, Amazon is also in a more precarious position than most rivals. Alexa is widely used, powering all those Echo devices, imbued into a full selection of Fire TV streamers and sets, and a whole lot more. Get Alexa wrong and you upset a lot of people. That might explain why we’ve been waiting for two years since a new Alexa was first teased.
There’s a chance that we’ll need new hardware to run the improved assistant, so it could be that there are new Echo devices to power more of the language model locally, but one thing we’re pretty sure of is that there’s going to be a price attached to this new Alexa experience.
There’s long been talk about Amazon charging for this smart AI experience. The price that has been floating around is that AI Alexa could cost as much as $10 a month, while the old Alexa remains as a free service.
Whatever the outcome, it looks like the day of reckoning for Alexa is coming in February – and there’s a lot at stake for Amazon.
