Amazon's Revamped Alexa Assistant Will Be Powered By Claude [Report]

Amazon's revamped Alexa assistant will be powered by Anthropic's Claude, rather than an internally developed artificial intelligence model, according to a new report from Reuters.

The company had planned to charge $5 to $10 per month for the new 'Remarkable' version of Alexa that will use generative AI to answer questions more intelligently, while still offering the 'Classic' version of the voice assistant for free. However, initial versions of its in-house software allegedly struggled to perform acceptably, forcing Amazon to find another solution.

Initial versions of the new Alexa using in-house software simply struggled for words, sometimes taking six or seven seconds to acknowledge a prompt and reply, one of the people said.
That's why Amazon turned to Claude, an AI chatbot developed by startup Anthropic, as it performed better than the online retail giant's own AI models, the people said.


"Amazon uses many different technologies to power Alexa," a company spokeswoman said. "When it comes to machine learning models, we start with those built by Amazon, but we have used, and will continue to use, a variety of different models - including (Amazon AI model) Titan and future Amazon models, as well as those from partners - to build the best experience for customers."

Anthropic is the clear choice for Amazon to partner with, as the company has already invested $4 billion into the startup. Notably, recent reports from this week claim that Apple is in talks to invest]in talks to invest in OpenAI, a rival AI company whose ChatGPT chatbot is being integrated into the next version of iOS.

The release of 'Remarkable Alexa' is expected in October with a preview of the new capabilities coming during Amazon's annual event in September.

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