Panos Panay, dressed in rigorous black, launched himself to give his first great Keynote as an Amazon employee. Not long ago, but with Microsoft where I was the head of the hardware divison. Your mission here is even more complex, because Try to show that Amazon has not lost the AI train. And to achieve this, he was in charge of presenting the new version of Alexa. A supervitaminated with AI.
During the presentation Panos Panay tried first to defend Alexa’s legacy, a voice assistant who according to this manager attracts millions of new customers every month. It is a unique statement, especially when it is evident that in recent times that technology has been far behind the modern models of generative.
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For Amazon it was not enough to integrate a model of AI capable of explaining with a synthetic voice how to make a recipe. “You will not buy the ingredients and will not send an invitation to your friends for dinner. A chatbot of AI does not take us to what is our vision for Alexa,” he explained during the event.
AND that’s where Alexa+ arrivesAlexa’s new version. An AI technology with which Amazon wants to change everything: we are facing an agthic that is capable of doing things for us. Not only to answer questions, but to take advantage of your integration with other devices and applications to perform actions.
In the demo shown by Panay Alexa made a reservation in a restaurant, sent a message to the kangaroo and added everything to the calendar. Not only that: it was also shown as Alexa+ is now much more conversational – here the new models and the recognition of natural language have done a good job – and is able to interact with the home automation of our home, for example.
In his official statementAmazon describes Alexa+ as smarter, conversational, personalized and capable of “doing things”, that is, completing tasks. In many cases, completing these tasks will make it necessary to give access to our data – you, contacts, information with which we want me to work – to this model of AI.
According to Amazon, Alexa+ has been trained so that he is able to recognize the tone to adapt to conversation. If he sees us agitated, for example, he will try to calm us down – he who noticed in the demo of Panos, for example.
There is another important element in that interaction. Alexa stores and remembers the data you are giving to be able to use them in the future. For example, user restaurants preferences or tastes about certain dishes or ingredients.
In the demos it could be seen how the interface of the connected screens Amazon Echo has undergone important changes. For example, it shows an animation at the bottom of the screen when “thinking”. Something since it is almost standard and we have seen in Gemini or Apple Intelligence. There are more animations to represent that Alexa is in action, and Amazon calls them “Alexicons”.
Home automation is one of the areas in which this type of interaction with AI is enhanced, and Amazon has created a specific widget for home automation in the interface of its smart screens. Natural language – to speak as we would normally, but with these devices – is the focus when controlling all kinds of options and actions.
In development …