Amazon has begun sending out invitations for a special artificial intelligence event on February 26, where the company plans to unveil the next generation of its voice assistant, Alexa, powered by generative AI, according to Reuters.

Since its launch in 2014, the Alexa voice assistant has become one of the most widely used voice assistants. However, Amazon has lagged behind the rapid advancements in generative AI, led by platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

Amazon is seeking to reinvent Alexa to make it capable of handling complex, context-aware conversations, as well as multi-faceted and multi-step requests.

The company is developing the new version of Alexa using AI models from Anthropic, rather than relying solely on its in-house technologies. This comes after previous versions of Amazon's AI technologies faced issues with response speed and providing incorrect answers. Amazon had planned to launch...