Amazon is gearing up to relaunch its Alexa voice-powered digital assistant as an artificial intelligence “agent” that can complete practical tasks

Amazon races to transplant Alexa’s ‘brain’ with generative AI

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2025-01-14 12:00:04

Amazon is gearing up to relaunch its Alexa voice-powered digital assistant as an artificial intelligence “agent” that can complete practical tasks, as the tech group races to resolve the challenges that have dogged the system’s AI overhaul.

The $2.4tn company has for the past two years sought to redesign Alexa, its conversational system embedded within 500mn consumer devices worldwide, so the software’s “brain” is transplanted with generative AI.

Rohit Prasad, who leads the artificial general intelligence (AGI) team at Amazon, told the Financial Times the voice assistant still needed to surmount several technical hurdles before the rollout.

This includes solving the problem of “hallucinations” or fabricated answers, its response speed or “latency”, and reliability. “Hallucinations have to be close to zero,” said Prasad. “It’s still an open problem in the industry, but we are working extremely hard on it.”

The vision of Amazon’s leaders is to transform Alexa, which is currently still used for a narrow set of simple tasks such as playing music and setting alarms, to an “agentic” product that acts as a personalised concierge. This could include anything from suggesting restaurants to configuring the lights in the bedroom based on a person’s sleep cycles.