Would you pay for a less dumb digital assistant?

Amazon is going to find out.

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The Washington Post’s Caroline O’Donovan reported that Amazon plans to sell a paid subscription for an artificial intelligence-enhanced version of Alexa that could cost as much as $10 per month.

Features of the Alexa subscription, coming in October, include recipe suggestions based on your family’s dietary restrictions and AI news summaries. Caroline reported that you can still use the current version of Alexa without a subscription fee.

(Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

The company already offers Amazon Prime and other subscriptions. And most people buy an Echo speaker or other Amazon device to get access to Alexa.

Still, a paid version of Alexa would be a milestone. The company has never directly charged for its digital assistant in the 10 years that Alexa has existed.

Paid Alexa is another example of a subscription fee for technology features or products, some of which you already got before at no extra cost.

Dating apps, social media services and even printer ink and kitchen gadget apps are pushing subscriptions. Google is among the companies charging extra for more digital storage on your phone. And tech analysts have suggested that Apple and Samsung, like Amazon, could charge a subscription fee for some AI features. Apple and Samsung did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Digital assistants have failed to deliver on their ‘smart’ promise

Tens of millions of Americans use Alexa and other digital assistants regularly, but mostly for relatively simple tasks. That could make it tough to convince people to pay for a version of Alexa.

According to research conducted by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, about two-thirds of Americans who own an Alexa-enabled device use it at least a few times a week to listen to music and ask simple questions, like checking the weather forecast.

According to the research group, the majority of people never use Alexa for more complex things, such as turning on the lights on command or doing grocery shopping on Amazon.

Those were some of the tasks that Amazon and other companies once expected digital voice assistants to be a key use case for. (Amazon has previously said that most Amazon device users use Alexa for shopping, but the company has not provided specifics.)

In the 2010s, there was a lot of optimism that digital assistants like Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant would become a dominant way we interact with technology, and that they would have as much of an impact on our lives as smartphones.

Those predictions were largely wrong. Digital assistants were dumber than companies claimed, and it’s often annoying to speak commands instead of typing on a keyboard or tapping on a touchscreen.

The AI-enhanced Alexa, first demonstrated a year ago, is based on a different technology than the current digital assistant. Siri and Google Assistant, now largely replaced by the Gemini chatbot, have also gotten AI makeovers.

After a decade of using voice assistants primarily to send a quick message, check the weather, or play music, it remains untested whether people want AI versions for more complex interactions. Perhaps our habits with digital assistants suggest that you want narrow-purpose technology to do just the basics.

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Other AI helpers with a subscription fee

If you think you wouldn’t pay for an AI like Alexa, just look at how many people subscribe to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The chatbot is free to use, but ChatGPT also has a $20 per month subscription with more advanced AI software and a higher limit on the number of interactions.

Market research firm Sensor Tower estimates that more than 2 million new and existing subscribers paid for ChatGPT through its smartphone apps in July. (OpenAI does not disclose how many subscribers it has.)

It is not without reason that a few million people pay $20 a month for an AI tool.

By comparison, The Post said it has about 2.5 million paying subscribers. Snap said in late June it had 11 million subscribers to its $3.99-a-month Snapchat Plus, which has perks like friend rankings. Netflix has 278 million subscribers.

Google doesn’t charge outright for the Gemini chatbot, but offers more advanced AI options in a $19.99-per-month Google subscription, which includes a bunch of other features.

Apple’s AI features in the next version of the iPhone operating system won’t cost anything extra, but you’ll likely need a new iPhone to take advantage of all the AI.

So for now, Amazon will be the only company charging a subscription for a successor to a popular digital assistant that people have been using for free since the 2010s. Amazon declined to comment on a subscription option for AI Alexa, which the company has not publicly discussed.

The AI ​​craze is giving companies a new selling point to make you pay more. It’s now up to you whether the promised features are worth it, or if you can’t stomach any more subscriptions.

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