Amazon CEO hints new AI Alexa will complete your tasks

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy did not provide an update on when the new Alexa will arrive when he spoke the company’s quarterly earnings call on Thursday But he did provide some details on how Amazon will differentiate its re-architected voice assistant from rivals whenever it finally launches.

Action, not just words, will be a key feature of the next Alexa, Jassy said.

“I think the next generation of these assistants and Generative AI applications will be better at not only answering questions and indexing data and summarizing data, but also taking actions,” Jassy said. “And you can imagine we’re doing pretty well with Alexa.”

Jassy here probably refers to agents called AIs that not only provide answers but also help you perform a task autonomously. For Amazon, that could mean a world where Alexa doesn’t surpass ChatGPT or Perplexity AI in depth or nuance of query responses, but perhaps it could take the lead in accomplishing to-do list priorities.

Amazon’s CEO admitted that the AI ​​applications gaining traction with users today are very good at “taking large corpora of data and summarizing it and being able to aggregate it and answer questions.” But, he pointed out, they are generally not good at “taking action for customers”.

A chance to be “awesome”.

Amazon’s Alexa exploded into consumer consciousness a decade ago when it was released alongside the first smart speaker, the Echo. Since then, Amazon and its partners have sold about 500 million Alexa-powered devices, and Jassy said on Thursday’s earnings call that there are now “a couple of hundred million active endpoints.”

But when ChatGPT launched and the Gen AI boom exploded, Amazon was caught red-handed. Since then, the company has struggled with technological and structural hurdles that continue to delay the launch of the new Alexa, according to a new luck the report. Some workers have been told that the new AI-powered Alexa deadline has been pushed back to 2025, According to a new Bloomberg report.

Amazon’s General Manager of Devices Panos Panay said luck last month The features of the new version of Alexa will encourage you to present talking about “emotion” and “connection”.

“The upcoming products are pretty awesome,” he said.

While the continued delay in releasing a revamped Alexa doesn’t make for great optics in the media, or perhaps even internally, Jassy and other company executives may recognize the opportunity to reintroduce a smarter Alexa into a crowded AI landscape.

Amazon founder and chairman Jeff Bezos has often talked about one-way and two-day gates when considering different decision-making periods. The former often requires a longer timeline before deciding on a way forward or bringing a product to market, as it likely won’t come back once you’ve passed through that door. And the launch of the new Alexa may be the most decisive example of a one-way gate at Amazon in the past decade.