Amazon Turns to Anthropic's Claude for Alexa AI Revamp
SAN FRANCISCO - Amazon's revamped Alexa due for release in October ahead of the U.S. holiday season will be powered primarily by Anthropic's Claude artificial intelligence models, rather than its own AI, five people familiar with the matter told Reuters.Amazon plans to charge $5 to $10 a month for its new "Remarkable" version of Alexa as it will use powerful generative AI to answer complex queries, while still offering the "Classic" voice assistant for free, Reuters reported in June.But 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.But Amazon's attempts to convince users to shop through Alexa to generate more revenue have been mostly unsuccessful and the division remains unprofitable.Ama