“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…

As envisioned, the paid version of Alexa would carry on conversations with a user that build on prior questions and answers, the people with knowledge of the Alexa strategy said.

The upgraded Alexa is designed to allow users to seek shopping advice such as which clothes to buy for a vacation and to aggregate news stories, the people said. And it is meant to carry out more complicated requests, such as ordering food or drafting emails all from a single prompt.

Amazon hopes the new Alexa will also be a supercharged home automation hub, remembering customer preferences so that, say, morning alarms are set, or the television knows to record favorite shows even when a user forgets to, they said.”

From Reuters.