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Amazon just held its latest hardware event on Wednesday, and the company announced some new products. During the presentation, the company let us in on the future of Alexa. According to the company, Alexa will be getting a boost from our old friend, generative AI.
As you well know, voice assistants use artificial intelligence. It’s not on the scale of something like ChatGPT, but there’s still some wizardry behind it. However, Amazon has been working on generative AI behind the curtains for about nine years. The company has been using its LLM to help train the user-facing Alexa assistant.
Amazon Alexa will use generative AI in the near future
We use generative AI on our computer screens or our phone screens, but Amazon wants to conquer a new frontier. It wants to focus on bringing generative AI technology to a digital voice assistant.
This is a move to make Alexa much more natural and conversational. Amazon has been working on certain things like latency and Alexa’s tone in order to make it seem like you’re talking to an actual human being. It’s focusing on making Alexa more conversational and natural sounding.
One thing that the company showed off during the presentation is called “Let’s Chat”. It looks like when you summon Alexa and say “Let’s chat”, you’ll gain access to a more conversational Alexa. At that point, just say what you want to look up. When you give your query, Alexa will give you a very human-sounding response.
Since this uses generative AI, you’ll be able to ask Alexa to generate spoken content for you. Just like with ChatGPT or other bots, you can ask it to write a story, poem, etc. It will be just like talking to one of the numerous chatbots that are on the market today.
The company announced that this feature will begin testing for customers in the US. It will be an early preview, and it will work on all Alexa devices, even the original Alexa devices that shipped back in 2014. We’re not sure when the testing will begin.