Amazon CEO hints new AI Alexa will full your duties

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy didn’t present an replace on when the brand new Alexa will arrive, when he spoke throughout the corporate’s quarterly earnings name on Thursday. However he did give some particulars on how Amazon imagines its re-architected voice assistant will stand out from rivals — each time it lastly launches.

Motion, and never simply phrases, shall be a key function of the following Alexa, Jassy stated.

“I think that the next generation of these assistants and the Generative AI applications will be better at not just answering questions and summarizing the indexing and aggregating data, but also taking actions,” Jassy stated. “And you can imagine us being pretty good at that with Alexa.”

Jassy right here is probably going referring to so-called AI brokers, which not solely give you solutions however assist perform a process for you as effectively in an autonomous manner. For Amazon, that would imply envisioning a world the place Alexa may not beat ChatGPT or Perplexity AI on depth or nuance of solutions to queries, however maybe might take the lead by carrying out priorities on a to-do checklist.

The Amazon CEO acknowledged that AI functions at present getting traction with customers are actually good at “taking large corpuses of data and being able to summarize and aggregate and answer questions.” However, he famous, they typically will not be good at “taking actions for customers.”

One shot at being “awesome”

Amazon’s Alexa burst into shopper consciousness a few decade in the past, when it was launched alongside the primary Echo good speaker. Since then, Amazon and its companions have bought about 500 million Alexa-powered gadgets, with Jassy saying on Thursday’s earnings name that there are at present “a couple of hundred million active endpoints.”

However Amazon was caught flatfooted when ChatGPT launched and the Gen AI increase erupted. Since then, the corporate has struggled by technological and structural hurdles that proceed to delay the launch of the brand new Alexa, in line with a latest Fortune report. Some staff have reportedly been advised that their new deadline for a completed AI-powered Alexa has been pushed again into 2025, in line with a brand new Bloomberg report.

Amazon’s prime gadgets government Panos Panay advised Fortune final month that the traits of the brand new model of Alexa will encourage him to introduce it speaking about “emotion” and “connection.”

“The products coming are pretty awesome,” he stated.

Whereas the continued delay in releasing the revamped Alexa doesn’t make for nice optics within the media, or maybe even internally, Jassy and different firm executives would possibly acknowledge the probability of getting only one shot at reintroducing a better Alexa right into a crowded AI panorama.

Amazon founder and chairman Jeff Bezos has usually talked about one-way and two-day doorways when considering completely different decision-making timelines. The previous usually requires an extended timeline earlier than deciding on a path ahead or launching a product into market, as a result of there’s possible no coming again when you cross to the opposite facet of that door. And the launch of latest Alexa would possibly very effectively find yourself being probably the most essential instance of a one-way door at Amazon over the previous decade.