Amazon said it would offer this new Alexa to all existing Echo speaker owners as part of a preview, but didn’t say when it would arrive.
Here’s how it worked during a demo at Amazon’s launch event: Say, “Alexa, let’s chat,” and an Echo smart speaker enters a special conversational mode. In this mode, Alexa acts like a speaking version of a chatbot, bantering back and forth about a wide range of topics. Amazon showed people asking it for advice about travel and to write stories and emails, with people able to interrupt and redirect the AI mid-sentence.
Amazon also said Alexa powered by generative AI would do a better job operating smart homes, such as taking multiple commands at once and making inferences about which devices people want to control.
(Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Interim CEO Patty Stonesifer sits on Amazon’s board.)
“You can have a near-human-like conversations with Alexa,” said Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services.
Amazon didn’t make a demo of the new conversational Alexa available for me to try at its event.
The live portion of Limp’s onstage demonstration didn’t quite live up to the “near-human” description. On several occasions, the AI sometimes paused awkwardly before responding to Limp. But it didn’t require Limp to say the “Alexa” wake word for each encounter, and it appeared to remember and use details from earlier in his conversation.
Amazon didn’t say much about how the new Alexa would deal with a significant known challenge faced by text-based chatbots: sometimes going off the rails. Generative AI, which is trained on vast quantities of data to predict what words could be used to respond to a prompt, can sometimes head down an odd, or even dangerous, path.
Amazon did announce that a separate version of conversational Alexa designed to answer questions for children in a “safe” manner would debut before the holiday season. That product has been trained on a more limited set of sources and has guardrails to keep the conversation on track, the company said.
The announcements were a tacit acknowledgment of a stark reality for one of Amazon’s showcase products: Alexa has lost its edge.
A talking speaker seemed like science fiction when Amazon launched in 2014. But today Alexa is also known for being bumbling and rigid in answering questions and completing tasks.
In the last year, more widely capable generative-AI chatbots such as ChatGPT have stolen the spotlight and people’s imaginations.
In his stage presentation, Limp said other chatbots have proven to be creative tools for professionals, but Amazon still had a large opportunity to bring it to mass consumers in their homes.
“Today generative AI has been focused on creators, not consumers,” said Limp. “When you are building an AI like this for the home, you have to think about it very very differently.”
As of 2022, 71.6 million Americans used Alexa monthly, according to Insider Intelligence. While a majority of American adults have heard of ChatGPT, only 14 percent have actually tried using it, according to a survey conducted in March by the Pew Research Center.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.