This month Amazon might reveal their new, smarter Alexa helper.

Though to be honest, Amazon's most recent example doesn't exactly need Ninja-grade cryptographic abilities to be cracked. Everyone loves a hidden code.

featuring five various variations on the invite design, each featuring swooshy lines in the backdrop, the corporation invited a new-products event on 26 February in New York. Side by side the five pictures, and those lines spell "alexa."

Indeed, note February 26 on your calendars as the much awaited (and apparently somewhat delayed from the initial plans) introduction of the "new" Alexa - an AI-supercharged voice assistant for the corporation.

New Alexa has been "designed to be able to converse with users" with its ability "to respond to multiple prompts in sequence and... even act as an agent on behalf of users by taking actions for them without their direct involvement," Reuters, which has been grilling its sources within Amazon, said.

Rightsholders, look away now: Reportedly a major partner for the overhaul is anthropic, whose legal struggle with music publishers is not yet completely resolved. Not surprisingly, though: Amazon has made $8 billion investments in Anthropic over past years.)

Positively for the music business, the report also highlighted that new Alexa is "designed to remember customer preferences to help make music or restaurant recommendations". That suggests that one of the revamp's selling propositions will be some intelligent features linked in with Amazon Music.

The correct word here is "selling". Although the new Alexa is supposed to be free in its first, restricted deployment, the longer-term goal is presumably a monthly subscription cost ranging from $5 to $10.

Everyone and their uncle were getting thrilled about smart speakers and voice assistants on-stage at music industry conventions long ago. Though such devices have remained selling, the buzz subsided and the assistants rolled out more widely.

If Amazon throws its whole weight on new Alexa; with Apple in the early days of combining its "Apple Intelligence" with its Siri voice assistant, and Google replying with its own technologies, smarter music features might be at the core of this fight.

That will re-spike several issues familiar from the first wave of smart speakers. As a label, how do you ensure your music is what Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant would choose over that of rivals? Could you possibly even affect that?

When its consumers are listening on one of the Big Tech trio's devices, Spotify will be attentively observing the circumstances as well: will it gain what it perceives as fair access to the capabilities of the next generation of smarter voice assistants?

But chances will also present themselves. Following on from the skills some started for Alexa in its current incarnation, what type of voice-driven experiences may labels and artists be able to create on top of these assistants? February 26 will bring additional knowledge.