Amazon CEO Andy Jassy at Amazon’s third-quarterly earnings hinted they might be developing an improved version of the virtual assistant, Alexa. The new Alexa might be able to perform tasks for the users along with answering questions and managing data. Amazon is said to be restructuring the ‘brain’ of Alexa with a new set of foundational models which will be revealed later.
The latest report on Alexa comes within a few months after Amazon announced that they will be enhancing Alexa with Generative Artificial Intelligence.
The CEO said, “I think that the next generation of these assistants and generative AI applications will be better at not just answering questions and summarizing, indexing, and aggregating data, but also taking actions.” He added that Amazon “continue to re-architect the brain of Alexa with a new set of foundation models that we’ll share with the customers in the near future.” Amazon seems to be pretty confident about their tech by saying “you can imagine us being pretty good at that with Alexa.”
The upcoming Alexa voice assistant is code-named ‘Remarkable Alexa’ and the CEO mentioned it to have ‘agentic’ capabilities as it can take actions on behalf of the user. Amazon first announced in September 2023 that they are improving Alexa with generative AI technologies. Amazon being one of the major investors of Anthropic is said to be replacing its model with Anthropic’s models.
Alexa in recent times went behind other voice assistants like Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri. Google Assistant and Siri are already available assistants on Android and iOS smartphones, whereas Alexa works on smart speakers. Even though Amazon sold over 500 million devices globally that can enable Alexa, criticism arose as they are lacking in technology. The Wall Street Journal reported that since 2017 Amazon lost tens of billions of dollars in its device business.
The improved development of AI calls for better updates every now and then to remain in the trend. The opinion of Google CEO Sundar Pichai “risk of underinvesting is dramatically greater than the risk of overinvesting” falls relevant as the growth happens while we blink our eyes. Tech giants including Amazon have invested billions of dollars in developing AI.
The updated Alexa was reported to cost $5 to $10 per month previously along with a free plan with fewer features. This was said to be launched in October but looks like it will take time. A report on Bloomberg says that Amazon might be having technical challenges that forced them to repeatedly postpone the debut of the updated Alexa, and the Alexa ‘brain’ might be stuck in the lab. The report says that the launch might be in 2025.
The virtual assistant AI will be rearchitected with GenAI. They are said to be moving beyond the available GenAI apps and would focus on the next-generation foundational model aiming at “cost avoidance productivity.” Jassy added that they are focusing on customer experience and “taking large corpuses of data being able to summarize and aggregate and answer questions.”
Amazon’s CEO revealed that they are investing 75 billion dollars for the next year’s capital and would be spending most of it on developing Amazon Web Services and Generative Artificial Intelligence at the third-quarterly earnings through a conference call with analysts. The CEO said that AWS has released about “twice as many machine learning and GenAI features as the other leading cloud providers combined.” He added, “AWS’ AI business is a multibillion-dollar revenue run rate business that continues to grow at a triple-digit, year-over-year percentage and is growing more than three times faster at this stage of its evolution as AWS itself grew.”
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