Amazon had already announced in September 2023 that it would expand its voice assistant Alexa with new AI models. The company gave further details at CES. In the future, Alexa users will be able to receive book recommendations from characters like the librarian Linda. Alexa also allows you to talk to fictional historical figures like Socrates, as Amazon reports. The “Character.ai” app is also used, on whose platform the recreated personalities can be seen. Initially this is possible in English. It is unclear when the function will come to other countries.
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From a three-star review in the Amazon shop for Character.ai it appears that the conversation with Socrates is convincing, but Albert Einstein sounds like a fairly plain American man who gives “verbose answers”. However, playing with the characters is fun.
More games
The AI game developer “Volley” has also announced “Volley’s 20 Questions” in Amazon’s Alexa Skills Shop, which can be played via Alexa. According to the company, this is one of the first language games based on a large language model.
“Splash” allows you to create and modify songs from different genres – all using Alexa voice control. According to Amazon, customers can then send the works to their smartphone.
Fire TV and Panasonic
Along with other TV manufacturers, Panasonic also integrates Amazon’s Fire TV into its devices. At CES, the company introduced the Z95A and Z95A OLED smart TVs, where customers can launch apps, play music, search for songs and control smart home devices via Alexa.
Alexa in the car
Through a collaboration with the car manufacturer BMW, there will be a next generation of intelligent voice assistants supported by the “Alexa Custom Assistant” (ACA). This allows Alexa to answer questions about different driving modes and activate modes. The next generation of voice assistants in cars should also be less distracting from driving, despite having an individual voice. Other car manufacturers are also relying on AI; VW spoke at the CES about wanting to integrate ChatGPT. Amazon also announced the next generation of robotaxis from its subsidiary Zoox.
Amazon, Siemens and AI
Siemens plans to integrate Amazon’s Bedrock service into its low-code platform Mendix. Bedrock provides access to a selection of core AI models from various AI companies via an API. This will allow more customers to build, scale and use applications on Amazon Web Services, particularly through the use of AI. Customers can select an AI model that best suits their use case and integrate this model quickly and securely into their applications. According to Amazon, it only takes a few clicks.
(mack)