Amazon’s new AI Alexa to give services partnering with Uber, Instacart, others

Amazon’s new AI-powered Alexa may launch in the US with several corporate partners who can handle tasks for users such as ride-hailing, grocery shopping, and restaurant reservations, according to a Business Insider report.
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These partners include Uber for ride-hailing, Ticketmaster for ticketing, Vagaro for local business booking, OpenTable for restaurant reservations, Grubhub for food ordering, Instacart for grocery shopping, Fodors for travel advice, and Thumbtack for home services, according to the report which cited an internal document.
These companies were confirmed to have worked with amazon on the project as of late August, according to the report, which added that Amazon is hoping to bring in a total of around 200 partners by the third year of launching the new Alexa and a paid subscription service for it as well.
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This comes as Amazon revamps Alexa with ChatGPT-like AI features. Internally codenamed Banyan or Remarkable Alexa, this has the potential to significantly improve the voice assistant with new AI features.
“Our vision for Alexa is to build the world’s best personal assistant,” the report quoted an Amazon spokesperson as saying. “Generative AI offers a huge opportunity to make Alexa even better for our customers, and we are working hard to enable even more proactive and capable assistance on the over half a billion Alexa-enabled devices already in homes around the world.”
All of this is because Amazon hopes the new AI updates will reignite interest in Alexa after it failed to establish a profitable business model. It is such that the report cited some Amazon employees as havin said that Alexa’s future hangs on the success of this new AI-infused assistant.
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