Amazon Unveils New Gadgets as AI Race Heats Up

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Amazon.com Inc. introduced an updated slate of Echo devices and pledged to bring ChatGPT-style artificial intelligence to Alexa-powered gadgets.

For more than a year the digital assistant has been using a home-built set of large language models — the foundational networks that enable ChatGPT and rival technologies — to help summarize text gathered from the web and make Alexa more conversant in various languages, Dave Limp, Amazon's senior vice president of Devices & Services, said in an interview.

New, more conversational capabilities will “roll out incrementally,” he said. “It's not years away, but there are some things that we have to solve.”

The company also said more than 500 million Alexa-powered devices have been sold by Amazon and other companies. The majority of those are Echo speakers and Fire TV streaming sticks and televisions, Limp said.

The company's devices are “in hundreds of millions of homes,” he said.

Amazon doesn't break out quarterly or annual sales for its devices, though Limp said Alexa usage was up 35% from the prior year and that shopping via the assistant increased 40%. Still, analysts and technology executives say interest in the digital assistant has plateaued as users reach the limits of its capabilities or give up trying new things. The software is adept at setting timers and reading out news updates, but can struggle with complicated queries or conversational tasks.

Those limitations have become more obvious in recent months with the debut of chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, which can pull off credible, if sometimes error-prone, imitations of human interactions. Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google are already incorporating “generative AI” into their search engines and other products —