Amazon plans to hold a press conference later this month to give a sneak peek at its eagerly anticipated and long-delayed Alexa generative artificial intelligence speech service.

When it is released, it will be the biggest improvement to the product since its first release, which sped up the development of digital assistants over ten years ago.

With over half a billion Alexa-enabled devices on the market, Amazon faces both a massive potential and a significant risk with the new generative AI-powered Alexa.

In an attempt to create a profit for the struggling company, Amazon is hoping that the redesign, which aims to communicate with consumers, will turn some of its hundreds of millions of users into paying customers.

The AI service is expected to react to several prompts in a sequential manner and even function as a "agent" on behalf of users, acting on their behalf without requiring their direct participation. In comparison, the present iteration often only manages one request at a time.

All of the issues with the now-familiar generative AI chatbots from OpenAI, Alphabet, and others are present in Alexa's redesign, including the potential for faked responses, or hallucinations.

Alexa may become a necessary everyday tool for scheduling and perhaps buying since it is available in cars, televisions, thermostats, and smartphones.

Alexa was created by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who had an idea for a service that would be similar to the voice-activated computers seen in "Star Trek."

Once it was mastered, the voice assistant was supposed to be used for hundreds of commonplace operations, such as turning on lights, heating the oven, logging on to the internet, playing music, sending emails, and calling a cab.

In addition to allowing users to provide several prompts in a single session, the new Alexa is built to remember user preferences so that it can propose restaurants or music. For example, it will allow customers to change their hamburger order before it is delivered.