Disney’s Magical Companion voice assistant on Amazon Alexa devices unveiled at CES 2023

Global entertainment corporation Disney was one of the over 3,000 companies at the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2023 in Las Vegas. At the event, the company showcased its own (and first) artificially intelligent voice assistant based on Amazon’s Alexa ecosystem. Called ‘Disney’s Magical Companion’, the service will be available only on Amazon’s Alexa devices, and can offer users assisted results and services using any of Disney’s characters — be it Donald Duck, or Doc Hudson from Cars.

The voice assistant has been in the making since September 2021, when Amazon and Disney announced that the Magical Companion, which can be summoned on Alexa devices using the voice command, “Hey, Disney!”, will coexist on Amazon hardware alongside the standard Alexa AI assistant. In May last year, the two companies showcased a preview of the service that gave a precursor to the service that has now been unveiled at CES.

To be sure, the Disney’s Magical Companion is not exactly an entirely new and completely standalone voice assistant — it is built using Amazon’s Alexa Custom Assistant. It is more like an additional feature that makes using Alexa-powered smart speakers and devices a bit more fun than the standard voice assistant. However, Disney did manage to add its own tech layer atop Alexa’s platform, which will translate into its use cases that include providing a rotational roster of Disney characters to answer your queries — be it on Disney-related trivia, or general queries on news, alarms, or the weather.

Disney said at CES that the assistant will not become instantly available across all Amazon hardware, and for everyone. The initial phase of rollout will see the service being made available in only a few rooms at Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort in the US right now. Going forward, it will be expanded further across more of Disney’s hotels and hospitality businesses.

For the mainstream user who owns Alexa hardware, Disney’s Magical Companion will come to their devices sometime later in the year, through the Alexa Skills store. It will work in the same way as adding one of the special edition voices to any Amazon Alexa-powered Echo device, so there is likely going to be a fee attached to it. However, Disney has said that it will be available for free on the Amazon Kids Plus subscription service — which is available presently in the US, the UK, Canada, Italy, Spain, France and Germany.

While the Magical Companion will become available in the US for mainstream users outside of Disney’s own hotels later this year, it’s not clear at the moment if the assistant will become available for India or not. Amazon has so far failed to successfully monetise its Alexa business vertical — a factor that has led to employees working on Alexa voice technologies being among the first departments to face layoffs announced in November last year.