Amazon.com Inc on Wednesday unveiled a slate of new and refreshed devices and updated its Alexa voice assistant with generative artificial intelligence to attract users to the unprofitable product as competition grows from chatbots like Google's Bard.
Alexa will converse more naturally, losing its robotic tone of nearly a decade, and answer questions like the start time for football games and recipe ideas. It will also be able to compose and recite poems, Amazon showed at the company's annual product launch in Arlington, Virginia.
At Amazon's Fall Devices event, they unveil a slew of new products designed for your home, including the Echo Show 8, a more conversational Alexa, Fire TV devices and its all-new Amazon Echo Hub. pic.twitter.com/TKRNwFYJXI
— CNET (@CNET) September 20, 2023
Amazon introduced Alexa in 2014, but has not found a consistent means to make it profitable, instead driving shoppers toward the company's website for more purchases. Typically accessed through speakers or enabled televisions, the service provides spoken answers to user queries, like the local weather, and can serve as a hub to control home appliances.
The Seattle-based company has worked to pep up Alexa particularly after OpenAI's ChatGPT burst on the scene in November with longform written answers to complex queries. Similar chatbots have sparked an investor frenzy in generative AI startups.
"You can now have a near-human-like conversations with Alexa," Dave Limp, Amazon's hardware chief, said at the event.
Limp, who is leaving the company before year's end, showed how one could ask a series of questions without repeatedly using the "Alexa" wake word, a new feature for at least some Alexa devices, like the refreshed Echo Show 8.
At the event, Amazon also introduced refreshed versions of children's Fire tablets, a soundbar for televisions and new search capabilities on the FireTV service to find free content.
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