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Apple was the first major tech company to launch a voice-based virtual assistant with the introduction of Siri in 2011. But when Amazon's Alexa voice service debuted in 2014, it introduced the idea of "smart speakers" and displays that you could speak to without pulling out your phone or pressing a button. The idea was to offer a sort of "ambient computing" experience where you could speak to Alexa anytime you're in a room with a supported device.

But Amazon has struggled to make money from Alexa. It turns out that people use it to control their smart homes, play music, set timers and reminders, and get answers to basic questions. They don't use it for shopping very much though, which was one of the things Amazon had hoped people would do. So the company is turning to generative AI to make a next-gen virtual voice assistant that's better at understanding your questions, giving natural-sounding responses, and doing much more. Amazon's not banking on the idea that you'll do any more shopping by voice though – so the company is expected to ask customers to pay $5 or $10 per month for this next-gen, enhanced version of Alexa when it launches in October.

Amazon Echo Spot

It's unclear to me at this point what kind of fancy new features Amazon will be able to offer that would convince most users to pay for upgraded service rather than continuing to use the free version of Alexa that's been around for a decade… especially at a time when rival tech companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are busy integrating AI capabilities into all the other devices you're probably already using around the home. Some of those services are free, while others do require a subscription.

According to a new report, Amazon has struggled to develop its own in-house AI models that are good enough to use for its subscription service at launch, so it's allegedly going to use a third-party model from AI company Anthropic.

Here's a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.

Ask Claude? Amazon turns to Anthropic's AI for Alexa revamp [Reuters]

Amazon allegedly plans to launch a new AI-enhanced version of Alexa in October and charge $5 or $10/month to use it. According to Reuters, it'll use Anthropic's Claude AI models instead of Amazon's own.

New 2GB Pi 5 has 33% smaller die, 30% idle power savings [Jeff Geerling]

The new Raspberry Pi 5 with 2GB RAM features an updated BCM2712 chip that's functionally identical, but cheaper to manufacture since some unused features were removed. Turns out that also makes it smaller and more energy efficient.

Lichee Pi 5A [Sipeed]

Sipeed is expanding its ecosystem of modular Lichee Pi devices with RISC-V processors with a new LM5a module featuring an ESWIN EIC7700 chip with a quad-core SiFive P550 RG64GBC CPU and a 13.3 TOPS AI accelerator and PCIe 3.0 x4 support.

We've known it was coming for a while, but now Sipeed has added a high resolution to its website in a new Lichee Pi 5A section. 

Play Store can now download multiple Android app updates at the same time [9to5Google]

The Google Play Store is rolling out support for downloading and installing updates for up to three apps simultaneously rather than waiting for one to finish before starting the next.

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