The Financial Post reports in its Thursday, Sept. 5, edition that Amazon plans to launch an updated version of its personal voice assistant Alexa in October. A Washington Post dispatch to the Post reports that the enhanced assistant will require a paid subscription for access, and it will introduce a new feature called "Smart Briefing" that offers daily, artificial-intelligence-generated news summaries tailored to each customer's preferences. In the past, Alexa has struggled to provide accurate answers to political news questions. In response, rival tech companies like Microsoft and Alphabet's Google have programmed their AI chatbots to refrain from answering political questions due to misinformation concerns. Despite this, Amazon says that AI features for curating, summarizing and exploring current events were among the top customer requests. Amazon believes that news summaries can encourage daily engagement with the assistant. The subscription to the new assistant could cost up to $10 (U.S.) per month, while the original version, referred to as "classic Alexa," will remain free to use. Amazon management is expected to finalize decisions on pricing, subscription structure and the product name later this month.