It's kind of weird that the company that helped pioneer the AI assistant with Alexa has been eerily quiet, while other companies announce their brand-new AI models. Even Amazon's smart home rival, Google, is working hard to get its Gemini AI model up and running on people's PCs. However, that silence may soon end, as a leak from Amazon has revealed the existence of what's called a "Remarkable Alexa" to compete with the others.

Amazon leaks show off the "Remarkable Alexa" paid subscription model

As spotted by The Washington Post, Amazon is currently working on a project internally called "Remarkable Alexa" or "Project Banyan." The company hopes to release it in October 2024, albeit it may appear under a different name than its internal codename.

Amazon's main focus is analyzing how people are using existing AI models and picking the bits that users want the most. The document notes:

"AI features that help customers curate, summarize, and explore current events was also rated as one of the top customer requests.”

As such, Amazon is working on making a "Smart Briefing" feature. This will take into account the interests that the user has, and use those topics to generate a news report based on what happened during the day. Amazon hopes that this will encourage "recurrent engagement" and make people use Remarkable Alexa every day.

Access to Remarkable Alexa will be around $10 a month, but users can keep using the free version (dubbed "Classic Alexa") for free. As such, it seems that Amazon isn't keen to ditch the Alexa that people know and love in exchange for an LLM. In the meantime, it may be worth checking out the best Amazon Echo devices in case Remarkable Alexa can use them, although I wouldn't be surprised if the company uses this time to release new hardware.