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According the tech giant, the latest advancements in generative AI have unlocked new possibilities in its personal AI assistant.
Global tech giant Amazon has announced new updates to digital assistant Alexa, now called Alexa+. Speaking at a launch event in New York, US, the senior vice-president of devices and services for Amazon, Panos Panay explained the update is powered by generative AI (GenAI) technology, in order to be a more active and conversational device.
New features include the ability to alert you when event tickets go on sale, make reservations, offer recipe suggestions tailored to specific household members, summarise and control events recorded on integrated devices such as Ring cameras, and contact local services, among others.
Reportedly, Alexa can now understand tone and the environment around it, to adjust its responses, in order to match or negate the mood of the user. “She’s been trained in a couple of different ways, from EQ to humour to understanding. She understands I’m a little bit nervous, she’s trying to calm me,” said Panay
“While the vision of Alexa has been ambitious and remains incredibly compelling, until right this moment, right this moment, we have been limited by the technology. An AI chatbot on its own doesn’t get us to our vision of Alexa.”
To be released in the US in the next few weeks, it is free for Prime users, however, Amazon will be charging a fee of $19.99 a month for non-Prime holders.
Daniel Rausch, Amazon’s vice-president of Alexa and Fire TV, said the upgrade should work on “almost every” Alexa model. He explained that Alexa+ has been trained on a “broad range of state-of-the-art” models, including Amazon’s Nova models and third-party models, including from Amazon-backed Anthropic.
Earlier this week, Anthropic launched the next phase of its GenAI model, the Claude 3.7 Sonnet. The upgrade enables the model to consider prompts for an extended amount of time, in order to increase quality, accuracy and relevancy.
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