At some Amazon events we’d be like 65 gadgets deep right now, and everyone would be shouting Alexa at a bunch of rings and sunglasses and stuff. But the story this year is, instead, a large language model. Which is probably more important than your average Echo device! “Better Alexa” is clearly the focus this year, not “More Alexa.”
Not surprising: Amazon is making big moves in generative AI. More surprising: it’s really convinced that AI should be like a person to talk to and work with.
Which is kind of the opposite of what we’re learning about chatbots! The more human and confident tools like ChatGPT, Bard, and Alexa sound, the more problematic it can be when they get stuff wrong. Really interesting that Amazon’s all in on this “talk to AI like it’s a person” strategy for Alexa.
Good in-home AI, Dave Limp tells us, is: conversational, lives in the real world and not a browser, is personalized just to you, has personality, and trustworthy. A pretty good list, actually.
Also, Limp proved his first point with an uncomfortable silence about the length of an Alexa delay, which was pretty great.
These events are funny — sometimes it’s an hour-long avalanche of gadgets, where Amazon is like, “this cabinet has Alexa, is that anything?” Other times it’s more measured and thoughtful, Amazon shipping products it thinks people will actually buy. This year, given the way the economy is going and what’s been happening within Amazon’s devices team, I’d bet on the more austere side of things this year. But here’s hoping for a little chaos too.
We’re about a half-hour out from the start of Amazon’s big fall device launch event, and a few of us spent a chunk of our morning on a tour of Amazon’s new headquarters. It’s... a headquarters! But there is a food truck outside that exists just for handing out free bananas, so that’s pretty great. Amazon food truck innovation, y’all.
