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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy today hinted at an improved “agent” version of the company’s Alexa assistant — one that can take actions on a user’s behalf.
“I believe the next generation of these assistants and generative AI applications will be better at not only answering questions and summarizing, indexing and aggregating data, but also at taking action,” she said during Amazon’s Q3 2024 earnings call. “And you can imagine we’re pretty good at that with Alexa.”
Jassy added that Amazon continues to “re-engineer the brain” of Alexa with “a new set of foundation models” that the company plans to unveil “in the near future.”
Amazon, which first announced that it would revamp Alexa with generative AI techniques in 2023, is said to… replacing Anthropic created its own Alexa-powered models after facing technical challenges. (Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.) At some point during the Alexa redesign, promotion The assistant reportedly had difficulty turning on smart lights and took up to six seconds to respond to queries.
The new Alexa, codenamed “Remarkable Alexa” internally, will reportedly cost between $5 to $10 per month, and is offered alongside a less capable free plan. Some reports indicated that it would arrive in October, but it appears to be suffering from delays.
Despite its presence in more than half a billion devices around the world, Alexa has not effectively contributed to Amazon’s profits. The company has lost tens of billions of dollars in its hardware business since 2017. According to For the Wall Street Journal.
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