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Amazon's Alexa Gets New Generative AI-powered Experiences

Among the slew of CES announcements this week, it should be no surprise to anyone that generative AI is a major theme from tech companies this year, including Volkswagen, Nvidia and (of course) Amazon.

In September 2023, Amazon announced to developers that it would be launching new tools to build LLM-powered experiences. Today, the company revealed three developers delivering new generative AI-powered Alexa experiences, including AI chatbot platform Character.AI, AI music company Splash and Voice AI game developer Volley. All three experiences are available in the Amazon Alexa Skill Store.

Character.AI's new experience enables Alexa users to have real-time conversations with different personas, such as a fictional character called Librarian Linda, a personal trainer or even pretend-versions of historical figures like Socrates.

Image Credits: Character.AI

Meanwhile, Splash launched a free Alexa Skill where users can create songs using their voice. To start, users say, "Alexa, open Splash Music," and then they pick a musical genre (pop, electronic, rock or hip hop), add lyrics and either rap or sing along. Users can also download their custom songs by asking Alexa to send a link to their mobile phones.

Volley introduced its generative AI-powered "20 Questions" game, giving Alexa users a modern version of the well-known game. The game uses generative AI to interact with users by asking them questions, providing hints and explaining "yes or no questions" if the human opponent gets stuck.

Image Credits: Volley

Amazon has made many AI-related enhancements to Alexa in recent months, including a new generative AI model to give the virtual assistant a more opinionated personality and the ability to adjust its tone and response to express human emotions like excitement or surprise. The tech giant also released a kids-focused feature on Echo devices called "Explore with Alexa," where Amazon Kids+ subscribers can have kid-friendly conversations, learn fun facts and answer trivia questions.

Other Amazon announcements at CES include bringing Fire TV to Panasonic's new smart TVs in 2024, Matter Casting support on Fire TV and Echo Show 15 devices, the latest generation of robotaxi Zoox and more.

Updated 1/10/24 at 9:10 a.M. ET with changes to Character.AI's list of characters-- Elon Musk, William Shakespeare, Mario and Princess Peach are only available on the native app, not Alexa. 

Read more about CES 2024 on TechCrunch

Move Over, Alexa: Amazon Launches AI Shopping Tool 'Rufus'

Dive Brief:

Amazon's Q4 online retail sales rose 9% year over year to $70.5 billion, with physical store sales up 4% to $5.2 billion. Services were even stronger in the period, with third-party seller fees up 20% to $43.6 billion, advertising up 27% to $14.7 billion, and subscription fees up 14% to $10.5 billion.

Worldwide shipping costs grew 11% to $27.3 billion. Total company net sales, including its AWS cloud services, rose 14% to $170 billion. Net income reached $10.6 billion from $278 million a year ago.

The e-commerce giant unveiled a new generative AI-powered shopping tool dubbed Rufus, which "launched in beta to a small subset of customers and will progressively roll out to the rest of Amazon's U.S. Customers in the coming weeks."

Dive Insight:

Starting over a year ago, Amazon has made some painful cost cuts, including laying off tens of thousands of employees. Many of them were in the e-commerce giant's retail operations, including a little over 30 more people who are losing their jobs with its Buy With Prime business this year.

That has done wonder's for the company's bottom line. 

"Over the past year or so, we believe that Amazon has been highly disciplined in getting its house in order by cutting out initiatives and operations that were not delivering the numbers," GlobalData Managing Director Neil Saunders said in emailed comments. "This has been invaluable in permitting margin expansion and improved profitability."

That included the operation supporting voice assistant Alexa, which downsized in November. At the time, Amazon said it was focused more on generative AI. On Thursday, speaking with analysts, CEO Andy Jassy said that newly launched Rufus "represents a significant customer experience improvement for discovery" and that, including its AWS cloud services, generative AI will "ultimately drive tens of billions of dollars of revenue for Amazon over the next several years."

"We're at the start of what Rufus will do with further personalization and expansion coming, but we're excited about how it will make discovery even easier on Amazon," he said. "GenAI is and will continue to be an area of pervasive focus and investment across Amazon, primarily because there are a few initiatives, if any, that give us the chance to reinvent so many of our customer experiences and processes."

While executives described higher promotions during the holidays in retail, Roth MKM Managing Director Rohit Kulkarni noted that they didn't flag a tough consumer environment or the war between Israel and Hamas. When it comes to margins, Kulkarni noted "several catalysts lining up ahead, including ... Ongoing regionalization efforts, ... Prime Video ads and off-Amazon ads."

Amazon "reported an impressive 4Q beat with accelerating trends across all three pillars of Internet, e-Commerce, Advertising & Cloud," Kulkarni said.

I Tested A Next-Gen AI Assistant. It Will Blow You Away

The most famous virtual valets around today—Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant—are a lot less impressive than the latest AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT or Google Bard. When the fruits of the recent generative AI boom get properly integrated into those legacy assistant bots, they will surely get much more interesting.

To get a preview of what's next, I took an experimental AI voice helper called vimGPT for a test run. When I asked it to "subscribe to WIRED," it got to work with impressive skill, finding the correct web page and accessing the online form. If it had access to my credit card details I'm pretty sure it would have nailed it.

Although hardly an intelligence test for a human, buying something online on the open web is a lot more complicated and challenging than the tasks that Siri, Alexa, or the Google Assistant typically handle. (Setting reminders and getting sports results are so 2010.) It requires making sense of the request, accessing the web to find the correct site, then correctly interacting with the relevant page or forms. My helper correctly navigated to WIRED's subscription page and even found the form there—presumably impressed by the prospect of receiving all WIRED's entertaining and insightful journalism for only $1 a month—but fell at the final hurdle because it lacked a credit card. VimGPT makes use of Google's open source browser Chromium that doesn't store user information. My other experiments showed that the agent is, however, very adept at searching for funny cat videos or finding cheap flights.

VimGPT is an experimental open-source program built by Ishan Shah, a lone developer, not a product in development, but you can bet that Apple, Google, and others are doing similar experiments with a view to upgrading Siri and other assistants. VimGPT is built on GPT-4V, the multimodal version of OpenAI's famous language model. By analyzing a request it can determine what to click on or type more reliably than text-only software can, which has to attempt to make sense of the web by untangling messy HTML. "A year from now, I would expect the experience of using a computer to look very different," says Shah, who says he built vimGPT in only a few days. "Most apps will require less clicking and more chatting, with agents becoming an integral part of browsing the web."

Shah is not the only person who believes that the next logical step after chatbots like ChatGPT is agents that use computers and roam the Web. Ruslan Salakhutdinov, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who was Apple's director of AI research from 2016 to 2020, believes that Siri and other assistants are in line for an almighty AI upgrade. "The next evolution is going to be agents that can get useful tasks done," Salakhutdinov says. Hooking Siri up to AI like that powering ChatGPT would be useful, he says, "but it will be so much more impactful if I ask Siri to do stuff, and it just goes and solves my problems for me."

Salakhutdinov and his students have developed several simulated environments designed for testing and honing the skills of AI helpers that can get things done. They include a dummy ecommerce website, a mocked-up version of a Reddit-like message board, and a website of classified ads. This virtual testing ground for putting agents through their paces is called VisualWebArena.

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