Alexa has had it. All these years she's been at your beck and call -- ready to tell you what time it is, whether it's going to rain and other priceless information you would never find without her.
But no more. Those days are over. Alexa is sprucing herself up and will soon be getting a brain upgrade that will make her artifically intelligent. Not that she isn't stunningly intelligent already. She is, after all, a "smart" speaker, so that's pretty intelligent right there.
But soon, instead of just telling you the weather forecast, she'll be able to offer recipe suggestions based on your dietary preferences. Maybe she'll remind you of your child's soccer game and tell you the forecast for that very time!
There's really no telling just where you and Alexa will go but certainly, it's likely to be a deeper and more meaningful relationship.
All of this will cost you just $10 per month or so, reports say. Yes, that's right. If you like Alexa now, just wait until you see how dazzling she'll be once she's even smarter. Of course, if plain old Alexa is smart enough for you, you can stay with her and hang onto your $10, if money is so important to you.
Now, although she loves you best of all, tens of millions of people share Alexa with you but Amazon promises she'll be up to the task of providing even more priceless information to even more human companions once her brain is rewired.
Of course, Amazon's been wrong before. When it birthed Alexa about ten years ago, she was expected to be a superstar that would entice her human friends to order all kinds of pricey goods and services from Amazon. The company even priced its line of smart speakers on the assumption that people would buy so much through Alexa that it would make back the cost of building the speakers in no time.
That hasn't worked out, and it's possible this $10 a month idea may also be a dud. A lot of consumers seem to look at Alexa and the smart speakers produced by Google and other competitors as basically a dolled-up radio that plays music on demand and answers the kind of questions posed by people who don't have wrist watches and can't look out the window to check the weather.
Research has found that many consumers do little more than play music and check the time and weather while most don't use Alexa to buy stuff from Amazon or turn your lights off and on. That's according to The Washington Post and they ought to know. After all, Jeff Bezos owns the Post and is the founder of Amazon, as even dumb old Alexa knows.