What to expect from Amazon’s big Alexa event this week

Amazon is holding a press event this week, where we expect it to finally launch its “new” Alexa. This could be the beginning of a major shift in how we use generative AI in our homes, or it could be a big disappointment.

The latter seems likely, based on the delays and persistent rumors that the voice assistant is struggling with its revamp. But I’m hoping we’ll at least end up somewhere in the middle — with a smarter, more useful Alexa, if not the “superhuman assistant” Amazon has promised.

The event, scheduled for 10AM on Wednesday, February 26th, in New York City, is being hosted by Amazon’s new devices and service chief Panos Panay, which is a strong hint there’ll be new hardware. The flagship fourth-gen Amazon Echo speaker is way past due for an upgrade, and with smart glasses being so hot right now, I could see Alexa getting cozier on our faces.

Here’s a look at what we expect from the event, what not to expect, and what we hope is coming. Remember to tune in to The Verge’s live blog on Wednesday.

I expect Amazon to announce the long-awaited arrival of its new Alexa, which has been rearchitected and infused with generative AI — courtesy of its LLMs, including Titan and reportedly some of Anthropic’s Claude.

First announced in the fall of 2023, the revamp of Amazon’s once trailblazing AI voice assistant has been a long time coming. While it’s fine to set a timer or play music and turn your lights off, the current Alexa has struggled to find purpose in a world dominated by ChatGPT, Gemini, and their ilk.

The new “Remarkable Alexa,” as it’s reportedly called, should understand natural speech, interpret context, respond to multiple requests in a single command, and take action on your behalf with either deeper API integrations and / or genuine agentic abilities.

All of this means that we should be able to talk to Alexa without using clunky nomenclature and get more useful responses (assuming Amazon has managed to squash Alexa’s reported need to show off).

For smart home control, we should be able to say a command like, “Alexa, turn out the lights, lock the back door, and turn the thermostat to Sleep — oh, and play sleep sounds in the bedroom,” and the Assistant will do it all.

Amazon’s new Alexa should also be tuned in to your smart home and its capabilities. At CES this year, I spoke with companies working on integrations with the new Alexa, using the new developer tools Dynamic Controller and Action Controller that Amazon announced in 2023. Then Amazon said it was working with GE Cync, Philips Hue, GE Appliances, iRobot, and Roborock on features that would allow the Assistant to better understand what you want devices to do. For example, say “Alexa, the floor is dirty,” and it will send out your robot vac.

GE Cync’s Carmen Pastore confirmed to The Verge that the smart lighting company is working on integrating what he called “Amazon Alexa Reflex” to simplify lighting scene control with natural language voice commands.

This is where Alexa can differentiate itself. The voice assistant could bring value if it can fuse its current capabilities with generative AI-powered improvements. However, reports suggest this has been a challenge, with the new Alexa prone to hallucinating or refusing to turn on lights. It’s also an area competitors Apple and Google, who are tackling the same challenge with Siri and Google Assistant, are reportedly struggling with.

A new flagship Echo speaker and better access to Alexa on the go

Thanks to the billions of cheap Alexa-enabled devices in people’s homes, Amazon has a head start in the smart home. However, the flagship Echo fourth-gen smart speaker is now four years old. The company has said its new Alexa will run on all current hardware, but I expect the improved voice assistant will come with a shiny new home — especially considering Panay, the new devices and services chief, has impressive hardware chops, courtesy of his time at Microsoft building the Surface line.

When it announced the new Alexa in 2023, Amazon launched the Echo Hub smart home controller and the third-gen Echo Show 8 smart home display. While we might see an Echo Hub 2.0, the stage is set for a new Echo speaker with a new design, improved processing power, local control, and more smart home sensors.

While the home is Alexa’s comfort zone, Amazon could continue pushing us to use Alexa on the go with new Echo Frame smart glasses and a third generation of the flagship Echo Buds, making the smarter Alexa accessible wherever we are.

At the 2023 event, Amazon showed off several new AI features on its Fire TV line, including an improved Alexa search and generative AI screensavers, along with a new soundbar and souped-up Fire TV sticks. While new capabilities are likely, it’s also possible we’ll see new, more powerful Fire TV hardware, perhaps with Thread and Matter functionality built in, to help power deeper integration between Fire TV, Alexa, and the smart home. We’ll have to wait and see.

No firehose of crazy gadgets

We probably won’t see a slew of new devices. There wasn’t a traditional fall hardware event in 2024. Instead, Amazon has announced a steady flow of new products over the past few months, including new Kindles and two new Echo Shows. And earlier this month, Ring announced its first 2K-capable security camera, and Eero expanded its line of Wi-Fi 7 routers. All of this points to this event being just about Alexa and ways to communicate with the AI.

Amazon has said publicly that it’s considering charging for the new Alexa, with reports suggesting a price between $5 and $10 a month. Some have said it will be free for a limited time.

Reuters reported that Amazon could generate $600 million annually if just 10 percent of its users paid $5 per month for the service. Considering that Amazon reportedly lost over $25 billion on its Alexa division, this would be a much-needed boost for the product.

A subscription-based Alexa would be a first for the company, but it’s fairly common with AI services. In the smart home, we’ve already seen features like AI-powered video search from Ring and Google Home behind paywalls.

But will you pay for a better Alexa? If it can deliver on its promises and more — maybe. The new Alexa needs to create enough value for users. One area it can do this is by solving specific problems. For example, I tested the Skylight Calendar, whose AI assistant could manage my household’s calendar for me. It costs $80 a year but is genuinely useful.

Making Alexa really useful is Amazon’s biggest hurdle. It doesn’t have the personal context that competing assistants like Siri and Google Assistant have by being embedded in your phone. If Amazon can find a way to connect to that personal data, combined with the context it has about your home, it could get there. It’s a big if, and Amazon has a huge trust and privacy mountain to climb to get there.

A good start would be getting rid of the annoying ads and “By the way” interruptions.