Amazon debuts new artificial intelligence-powered Alexa voice assistant

Amazon on Wednesday unveiled the first major overhaul of its Alexa voice assistant since its introduction more than a decade ago, embedding it with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI).
Reuters:
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The effort carries significant weight at Amazon, which has plowed billions of dollars into Alexa since its launch in 2014 in the hope of putting the service into a range of devices and ultimately driving sales on its main e-commerce website.
The new service is called Alexa+, Panay said, echoing the nomenclature of the higher tier of many tech and streaming service offerings. Alexa+ is free for Amazon Prime members and is priced at $19.99 a month for non-Prime users. The service will be available in March to some users, with the rollout expanding to more people over time.
The event marked the unveiling of a secret project known internally as “Banyan” aimed at making Alexa more conversational. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can learn from data and improve over time.
While Amazon’s Alexa was launched three years after Apple’s Siri hit the iPhone maker’s devices, Alexa helped make the use of voice assistants more mainstream…
The new Alexa AI service will be able to respond to multiple prompts in sequence and even act as an “agent” by taking actions for users without their direct involvement. That contrasts with the current iteration which generally handles only a single request at a time.
Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Echo, acknowledged AI startup Anthropic’s contribution to building Alexa+, confirming a Reuters story that Anthropic’s Claude was an underpinning of the service. Amazon has invested $8 billion in Anthropic.

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MacDailyNews Note: Apple’s long-promised overhaul of its long-neglected Siri digital assistant is beset with “engineering problems and software bugs” that threaten to delay or significantly limit its release, Mark Gurman reported for Bloomberg News earlier this month. Apple’s full Siri overhaul will likely not arrive until iOS 18.5, expected in May.

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