No, but in the case of Amazon’s Alexa, the benefits of having a subscription to Amazon Prime are worth it. Most digital assistants can handle the basics of their job without a paid subscription — so they can tell you about the weather and local traffic, make internet phone calls, and answer questions about anything they can search the web for. That said, most of the fun of having a digital assistant comes with streaming music and shopping, neither of which are free. If you have a subscription to Amazon Prime, for example, you can use Alexa to stream from Prime Music’s robust catalog of artists, and you can ask Alexa to purchase items for you.