Amazon eyes news partners for revamped AI Alexa voice assistant

Amazon is reaching out to news publishers about opportunities to license their content for the next generation of Amazon's Alexa voice assistant, slated to debut in 2025. The company plans to debut a new, smarter version of Alexa, using generative AI to power customized responses to real-time user queries about the news. The tech giant is eyeing preliminary tests with several publishers who it hopes can serve as launch partners for the revamped Alexa in late 2025. It's currently testing new ways to incorporate news answers into Alexa via text and photo query results. The company isn't testing generative AI video outputs as part of its revamped Alexa offering at this time.