Amazon's next-gen "Remarkable" Alexa assistant will be powered by Anthropic's Claude AI, cost 5-10 per month and arrive in October ahead of the holidays, five sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters. The company originally planned to use in-house software for the new chat assistant, but it reportedly struggled with latency issues, taking up to six or seven seconds to acknowledge a request and reply, one source said. By contrast, Claude -- a rival to Google's Bard, ChatGPT and others -- performed better. Amazon didn't confirm the story, but said that it uses language models from partners as well as its own. "When it comes to machine learning models, we start with those built by Amazon, but we have used, and will continue to use, a variety of different models -- including (Amazon AI model) Titan and future Amazon models, as well as those from partners -- to build the best experience for customers," a spokesperson told Reuters.

We've known for a while that Amazon is planning to soup up Alexa with generative AI features. While the company says it has been integrating that into various aspects of the voice assistant, it's also working on a more advanced version of Alexa that it plans to charge users to access. Amazon has reportedly dubbed the higher tier "Remarkable Alexa" (let's hope it doesn't stick with that name for the public rollout). According to Reuters, Amazon is still determining pricing and a release date for Remarkable Alexa, but it has mooted a fee of between roughly 5 and 10 per month for consumers to use it. Amazon is also said to have been urging its workers to have Remarkable Alexa ready by August -- perhaps so it's able to discuss the details as its usual fall Alexa and devices event. This will mark the first major revamp of Alexa since Amazon debuted the voice assistant alongside Echo speakers a decade ago.