Amazon is gearing up to showcase new hardware on February 26 at an event in New York City. The company is expected to offer a long-awaited update on its Alexa digital assistant. Panos Panay, Amazon’s senior vice-president of devices and services, is expected to be present.

The company skipped its usual Fall hardware event in 2024 amidst rumours it was struggling to get its refresher Alexa in shape for launch. The company announced an improved Alexa powered by LLMs in September 2023 but is yet to ship the promised improved digital assistant.

A refreshed Alexa will be able to compete in the generative AI space, occupied by rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot, as well as Claude, the chatbot created by AI startup Anthropic.

A few months ago, Amazon refreshed its Kindle lineup, so it’s unlikely that we’ll see new e-readers from the company later this month.

In October, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told investors the new Alexa could launch “in the near future”. He said the company is working to “rearchitect the brain of Alexa with a new set of foundation models”.

Jassy has been dealing with cost-cutting measures across Amazon since late 2022. Since its launch in 2014, Alexa is yet to become an important money-maker for Amazon. There are hundreds of millions of customers who have Alexa-enabled devices but monetising the assistant is quite another thing.

This will be the first big event hosted by Panos Panay since he joined the company from Microsoft in 2023. He hosted a small event when the new Kindles were launched in October. His ‘devices and services’ is the group responsible for Echo smart speakers, Fire TVs, Kindles and Alexa, among other products.