Report: Amazon to Refashion Alexa Into AI Agent
Amazon is reportedly turning its digital assistant, Alexa, into an artificial intelligence agent.
In the new role, Alexa would be able to complete practical tasks, although the tech giant must resolve some issues that have plagued the voice-activated system’s upgrade, the Financial Times reported Tuesday (Jan. 14).
For the last two years, Amazon has worked to redesign Alexa so that its “brain” is replaced with generative AI, the report said.
Alexa needs to clear several technical hurdles before launch, such as “hallucinations” or fabricated answers, its response speed and reliability, said Rohit Prasad, head of Amazon’s artificial general intelligence (AGI) team, per the report.
“Hallucinations have to be close to zero,” Prasad said, according to the report. “It’s still an open problem in the industry, but we are working extremely hard on it.”
While Alexa performs a range of functions, such as playing music, setting alarms or answering questions, the company’s vision is to turn it into a personalized concierge, the report said. Alexa would suggest restaurants or set lights in a bedroom according to a user’s sleep cycles.
Multiple workers from Amazon’s voice assistant team said the project was saddled with complications after years of AI research and development, according to the report. Former workers said the delayed rollout was chiefly due to the unexpected difficulties of switching and combining the simpler, predefined algorithms Alexa was built on with more powerful but less predictable large language models.
Amazon said it is “working hard to enable even more proactive and capable assistance” of its voice assistant, per the report.
The PYMNTS Intelligence report “How Consumers Want to Live in the Voice Economy” found that roughly a quarter of American consumers said they would be willing to pay $10 per month to access a virtual assistant that could handle everyday tasks.
Meanwhile, in retail applications, Keith Kirkpatrick, research director of enterprise applications at The Futurum Group, told PYMNTS this month: “I think in time, AI agents will impact certain job functions in retail, but most of these tasks are digital, as opposed to physical tasks. As such, many of these functions are still marketing- or commerce-based, and retailers will be looking to companies in adjacent industries to see how well AI agents … are delivering value to their customers.”
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