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 — every time it lastly launches.

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

“I feel that the following era of those assistants and the Generative AI purposes shall be higher at not simply answering questions and summarizing the indexing and aggregating information, but additionally taking actions,” Jassy stated. “And you may think about us being fairly good at that with Alexa.”

Jassy right here is probably going referring to so-called AI brokers, which not solely offer you solutions however assist perform a job for you as effectively in an autonomous approach. For Amazon, that might imply envisioning a world the place Alexa won’t beat ChatGPT or Perplexity AI on depth or nuance of solutions to queries, however maybe might take the lead by undertaking priorities on a to-do record.

The Amazon CEO acknowledged that AI purposes at the moment getting traction with customers are actually good at “taking massive corpuses of information and having the ability to summarize and combination and reply questions.” However, he famous, they often usually are not good at “taking actions for purchasers.”

One shot at being “superior”

Amazon’s Alexa burst into shopper consciousness a couple of 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 units, with Jassy saying on Thursday’s earnings name that there are at the moment “a few hundred million energetic endpoints.”

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

Amazon’s high units govt Panos Panay instructed 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 merchandise coming are fairly superior,” 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 may 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 typically talked about one-way and two-day doorways when considering completely different decision-making timelines. The previous typically 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 aspect of that door. And the launch of recent Alexa may very effectively find yourself being essentially the most essential instance of a one-way door at Amazon over the previous decade.