Amazon held this year’s new products conference, unveiled a slew of gadgets and an update to its popular voice assistant Alexa, infusing it with more generative AI features to better compete with other tech companies who’ve rolled out flashy chatbots.
Massive Offerings During Product Release
Besides being powered by generative artificial intelligence (AI), features of the Alexa voice assistant, the new Echo speaker, computers, glasses, televisions, and other hardware were unveiled at the conference.
A full line of new products aims to attract buyers ahead of the blockbuster holiday shopping season, including Black Friday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.
Amazon expressed that the new Alexa LLM “is a truly generalizable large language model that’s highly optimized for the Alexa use case; it’s not like what you find with Bard or ChatGPT or any of these models.”
During a demonstration at the company’s second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, on Wednesday, Amazon’s devices chief, Dave Limp, said the latest language model would allow consumers to engage in more human-like conversations with a “smarter and more conversational” Alexa.
Alexa Can Do Way More than Previous Versions
Amazon hosts the annual gadget event to showcase new devices to journalists and industry insiders before they officially hit the market. Among other things, the tech giant also showcased a fee-based emergency service for Alexa, which allows users to call for help without using their phones, new Echo smart speakers, and Amazon Fire tablets for kids.
Amazon demonstrated how Alexa communicates with users. The system can learn about the user through the conversation, such as knowing the user’s favorite sports team. Based on previous conversations, Alexa can learn the user’s general needs, eliminating the need for the user to provide context again to activate Alexa’s wake word.Amazon claims it is already working with GE Cync, Philips, GE Appliances, iRobot, Roborock, and Xiaomi on these features and is opening the program to more developers. Amazon has not provided details on how or when developers will gain access to these tools.
