The team is working towards a June 30 launch deadline, and has been testing the underlying voice technology, dubbed "Remarkable Alexa," with 15,000 external customers, these people said.
Internally, however, Amazon isn't satisfied with the performance of the new Remarkable Alexa yet.
But the new Remarkable Alexa follows a more centralized structure, where language understanding and response generation use a single language model.
The Classic Alexa team, for example, wants to protect their work by insisting on using what they built for the old Alexa, one of the people said.
In addition to the subscription-based Alexa, Amazon is also working on a new Alexa product that can be used within a web browser, people familiar with the project told BI.
Persons:
Alexa, Dave Limp, Rohit Prasad
Organizations:
Business, Alexa, Google, Apple, Intelligence, Amazon, Alexa Plus, Reuters