Amazon's upcoming Alexa AI brain transplant might make you use it more than just weather and timers
Share:
But will Amazon's Alexa AI revamp come too late to matter?. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Amazon has spent years extolling Alexa's abilities as a voice assistant, even though it seems most people use it mainly to set timers and check the weather.
![[Eric Hal Schwartz]](https://vanilla.futurecdn.net/cyclingnews/media/img/missing-image.svg)
Even so, that hasn't stopped Amazon from plotting a far bigger place for Alexa in your life. Amazon wants Alexa to graduate from her relatively simple life of timers and trivia into the AI big leagues as a true personal concierge by leveraging the latest AI models, as Amazon's artificial general intelligence (AGI) leader Rohit Prasad explained to the FT.
Prasad and Amazon want to fully transform Alexa’s brain through a kind of 'transplant' to swap out the old question-answering engine for generative AI models. If all goes according to Amazon’s ambitious plan, Alexa 2.0 will be the digital butler constantly promised, rather than an audio stopwatch and remote control. Prasad admitted it won't be easy, though he is confident Amazon can defeat the obstacles in the way.
If he isn't having hallucinations, Alexa needs to eliminate any hallucinations of its own created by the AI. An assistant that fabricates responses that sound plausible but are completely wrong isn't going to get a lot of use. When you’re asking about the best route to the airport, “plausible but wrong” isn’t going to cut it. Further, Alexa needs to be reliable if people ask it to do more than just play their favorite music. The wrong song is no big deal, but if you request it to book a table for dinner, adjust your lights, and double-check your babysitter’s arrival time, you need to be confident it won't get anything wrong.
