World e-commerce big Amazon is ready to ‘relaunch’ its digital assistant Alexa as a synthetic intelligence agent. For the previous two years, the corporate has been reportedly engaged on redesigning Alexa and integrating generative AI.
Amazon needed Alexa to transcend performing easy duties like setting alarms and reminders or taking part in music to extra sensible duties utilizing AI.
Rohit Prasad, the top scientist at Amazon’s AGI (synthetic common intelligence) staff, mentioned that to be able to perform as an AI agent, Alexa should be capable to name a whole lot of third-party software program and providers. He added that the corporate’s Nova fashions had been constructed with Alexa’s wants in thoughts.
Nevertheless, a number of staff revealed that Amazon encountered quite a few challenges, involving hallucinations, latency, and reliability, to rework Alexa into an AI agent. “Hallucinations must be near zero,” mentioned Prasad, including that the corporate is ‘working extraordinarily onerous on it’.
Rebranding Alexa as an AI agent is predicted to enhance the product’s performance and gross sales. A examine from Mountain Analysis means that over 70% of customers would like merchandise that explicitly disclose the usage of AI.
“Whereas most customers haven’t used AI firsthand, they continue to be or excited within the expertise so long as it’s not hurting individuals and types are being clear with its utilization. The alternatives it presents are just about limitless,” learn the report.
Whereas Alexa does use AI to perform the duties it will probably immediately, there’s little or no disclosure round this.
Voice-based AI brokers will certainly be on the rise in 2025. On the finish of final yr, Hume AI, the voice-to-voice ‘conversational’ assistant, explored a brand new functionality powered by Anthropic Claude’s Pc Use.
Hume AI converts voice instructions to textual content that Claude can recognise, which is then translated into actions that Pc Use performs. To reveal its capabilities, Hume AI was taken to X, the place a person verbally instructed Hume AI and Pc Use to play chess on an online browser.
As soon as Alexa is rebranded as an AI agent, it might be fascinating to see if Amazon explores Pc Use capabilities. Anthropic was one of many first firms to construct an autonomous pc use agent, adopted by Microsoft’s Copilot Imaginative and prescient and Google’s Challenge Supervisor.
Claude’s device, nevertheless, has discovered the first-mover benefit. Many firms combine it into their workflows, and builders construct distinctive use instances with it. Amazon is one among Anthropic’s largest buyers, investing $4 billion within the AI startup in March 2024.
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