Amazon kicked off the smart speaker product category with the debut of the Echo smart speaker powered by the Alexa voice assistant in 2014. Google followed in 2016 with its Google Home devices (now known as Google Nest) with Google Assistant answering your voice commands.
Hundreds of millions of these smart speakers have been sold over the past eight years – Google and Amazon have heavily subsidised the price to get them into homes all over the world. The payoff for the two companies is a treasure trove of data – they know users’ daily routines, what they are researching on the web, and the services we use voice commands to access.
But smart speakers really haven’t evolved much in the past few years, failing to get beyond issuing commands to turn on lights or heaters, reading out short info snippets culled from the web, and letting us know what calendar entries we have coming up. The conversations with Alexa, Google Assistant, or Apple’s Siri for that matter, are still fairly basic and stilted.
If Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos expected a big Alexa-powered bump in online shopping at Amazon.com, it didn’t eventuate. That saw Amazon cut nearly 2,000 staff from its Alexa division late last year in a bid to rein in costs at the loss-making voice assistant division.
The company says it is still committed to Alexa, but is under pressure to make it pay its way as a host of new chatbots powered by generative AI hit the market.
Amazon is in catch-up mode and earlier this month demoed a new version of Alexa based on Amazon’s own large language model (LLM) and generative AI engine. Reviews were mixed.
“Alexa 2.0 appears to be very much a work in progress. I watched it repeatedly get questions wrong. And can we trust it in the places we use smart speakers at home, like children’s bedrooms?” The Washington Post’s Geoffrey A Fowler concluded.
The big advance Amazon appears to be working on is to make Alexa more fluid in its conversations by allowing users to interrupt and redirect it mid sentence, rather than wait for an irrelevant answer to play out. Alexa 2.0, like ChatGPT, will also be capable of remembering multiple questions in an exchange with you, so learns the context of what you want to know as you keep chatting.
A conversational version of Alexa, triggered with the command “Alexa, let’s chat”, will be availble on existing Echo devices later this year. There’ll also be a version for children, with the AI trained on a more limited range of data sources to avoid answers inappropriate for childing issuing forth from Alexa.
That’s a big consideration for Amazon – the debut of Microsoft’s Bing Chat was nearly derailed by disturbing examples of ‘hallucinations’, where the AI chatbot embedded in the Bing search engine began making up information and displaying seemingly odd behaviour in longer conversations with humans.
Smarter home automation
Amazon says it is putting the guardrails in place to avoid that happening with Alexa. But the early demos suggest the e-commerce giant has some way to go to improve the quality of conversational AI on the Echo for it to have any chance of being a ChatGPT rival.
With more than 70 million Americans using Alexa monthly, the potential upside is huge for Amazon if it can pull off a decent upgrade of its voice assistant. For instance, being able to converse with Alexa to draft emails and documents, or to plan you week’s schedule, could help you save time and be more productive.
Amazon’s conversational AI could also make its home automation features, accessed via Alexa, more intuitive.
“For example, saying, “Alexa, it’s too bright in here,” would prompt Alexa to dim the lights. And, saying, “Alexa, close all the blinds, and turn off all the lights, except for the ones in the living room” would trigger multiple simultaneous actions while understanding the exception of keeping the living room lights on,” Amazon’s Connie Chen wrote in a blog post.
We’ll find out in the coming months how well Alexa lives up to that promise. The good news is that more sophisticated AI features won’t require a smart speaker upgrade, with the intelligence delivered from the cloud, with the speaker serving to trigger the conversation with you.
New Fire TV Stick 4K Max
Amazon has also unveiled a new Fire TV Stick, its device for running smart TV features on your TV screen. If you have a reasonably new model TV from the likes of Samsung, LG, Sony or Panasonic, chances are you’ve already got a smart TV interface and all the video streaming apps you need. So why would you need the Fire TV Stick?
The interface and features are probably a bit slicker than the smart TV interface you currently use. The Fire TV Stick will particularly appeal if you are a subscriber to Amazon Prime Video and its music streaming service. The integration is very compelling, and you can access video games, podcasts and other content services as well. The new Fire TV Stick offers an upgraded 2.0GHz quad-core processor, and supports wifi 6E, for a smoother streaming experience over compatible wifi networks.
The new Fire TV Ambient Experience also lets you use the Fire TV Stick to display artwork, calendar info and reminders on your TV screen.
Price: $129
