Amazon lets users change Alexa's personality: friendly, brief or chill

Voice assistants have spoken to us the same way for years: politely, neutrally and sometimes annoyingly wordy. Amazon has decided it is time to change that. The company has launched three "personality style" presets for Alexa Plus that let users in the US choose the tone the AI assistant uses with them: brief, friendly or chill.

The idea seems simple, but it rests on an important observation. Since the launch of Alexa Plus, an updated version of the assistant with expanded AI capabilities, Amazon has been collecting feedback and reached a conclusion that is obvious but was long ignored: everyone has their own communication style, and a one-size-fits-all assistant "personality" inevitably irritates part of the audience. Some people want Alexa to be warm and chatty, while others dream of getting answers without introductory pleasantries and extra words.

The three new presets tackle the problem in different ways. "Brief" mode is a godsend for those who are driven up the wall by cheerful chatbots. In this mode Alexa answers shortly and to the point, without ritual phrases like "Great question!" or "Happy to help!". "Friendly" mode works in exactly the opposite way: the assistant becomes warmer and more attentive, adding elements of casual conversation. Finally, "Chill" gives Alexa a calm, unobtrusive tone, as if you were talking to an unflappable friend who is in no hurry.

Behind this change lies a deeper technology trend. The biggest AI companies are gradually realizing that a model's intelligence is a necessary but insufficient condition for mass adoption. People form emotional attachments to the technologies they use every day, and the character of that interaction matters a great deal.

OpenAI is experimenting with tone settings in ChatGPT, Google is working on personalization for Gemini, and Character.ai has built an entire business on the idea that users want to choose exactly who they talk to. Amazon is moving in the same direction, with one important difference: this is a voice assistant built into the physical space of the home, where an irritating tone is felt far more sharply than in a text chat.

Still, three presets are only the beginning. For now Amazon offers a choice of fixed styles, but the logic of development suggests the next step will be fine-tuning: sliders for formality, humor and wordiness. Further out lies an adaptive system that adjusts itself to your mood and the context of the conversation. In the morning, when you are rushing to work, the assistant will be terse. In the evening, when you are cooking dinner and want to chat, it will be more talkative.

The limitations are worth noting too. The feature is available only to Alexa Plus subscribers in the US, which narrows the audience considerably. For Russian users, for whom Alexa remains a niche product anyway, the news is more indicative than practical: it shows where the industry as a whole is heading. Yandex's Alice, incidentally, does not yet offer this kind of flexibility, although Yandex's voice assistant remains one of the most advanced on the Russian-language market.

Personalizing the character of AI assistants is not just a marketing gimmick. It acknowledges a fundamental fact: a technology becomes truly mainstream only when it stops forcing a single way of interacting on the user. Amazon has taken the first step by offering three options. The question is how quickly the rest of the market will follow, and who will be first to offer a truly adaptive assistant, one able to sense which tone is appropriate at any given moment.