Amazon.com Inc. introduced an updated range of Echo devices and committed to bringing ChatGPT-style artificial intelligence to Alexa-powered gadgets.
For more than a year, the digital assistant has used a large set of home-built language models — the underlying networks that enable ChatGPT and rival technologies — to summarize text gathered from the web. and create Alexa fluent in more languages, Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president of Devices & Services, said in an interview.
New, more conversational capabilities will “be rolled out gradually,” he said. “There aren’t many years left, but there are some things we have to deal with.”
Amazon on Wednesday announced four updated Alexa devices:
- Echo Pop, take the company’s fabric-covered, spherical Echo Dot smart speaker and cut it in half. The hemisphere device, on sale for $40, comes with technology borrowed from Amazon’s eero router subsidiary that can extend home Wi-Fi coverage
- The refurbished Echo Show 5 combines Alexa with a 5-inch display. Amazon says the $90 speaker is 20% faster than the previous generation and has clearer sound.
- The updated version of the Echo Show 5 Kids comes with a year of Amazon’s Kids subscription with age-appropriate audiobooks, videos, and games. It will be sold for $100.
- A new version of Amazon’s Echo Buds loses the noise cancellation of previous versions, but, at $50, costs less than half. The buds allow users to listen to music and call Alexa on the go.
The company also says more than 500 million Alexa-enabled devices have been sold by Amazon and other companies. Most of them are Echo speakers and Fire TV streaming sticks and TV, Limp said.
“The company’s devices are in hundreds of millions of homes,” he said.
Amazon doesn’t release quarterly or annual sales for its devices, though Limp says Alexa usage is up 35 percent year over year and shopping through the assistant has grown 40 percent. However, analysts and tech executives say interest in the digital assistant has waned as users reach the limits of its capabilities or give up trying new things. The software is great at setting timers and reading news updates, but can struggle with complex queries or conversational tasks.
Those limitations have become more apparent in recent months with the launch of chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can reliably mimic, if sometimes error-prone, interactions of human. Microsoft Corporation. and Google of Alphabet Inc. incorporated “creative AI” into their search engines and other products — putting pressure on Amazon to make Alexa easier to talk to.
Limp said Amazon is proceeding cautiously with its own AI. Among the challenges the company is hoping to solve are how Alexa interacts with multiple family members in a home and how to prevent the software from making things up.
“If you say turn those lights on, those lights have to be on,” he said. “You’ll see us make a lot of progress this year with Alexa and major language models.”
