Amazon’s Alexa is more than a basic speaker assistant and in upcoming months will become an even more powerful tool for customers. During Amazon’s first-quarter earnings call last April, the company announced it will be working towards making the popular Alexa smarter by developing a more enhanced large language model (LLM).
Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky says, “We’re continuing to invest in infrastructure to support AWS customer needs, including investments to support Large Language Models and generative AI.”
These deep-learning algorithms have been used in Alexa before. “We’ve had a large language model underneath it, but we’re building one that’s much larger and much more generalized and capable…. I think there’s a significant business model underneath it,” said CEO Andy Jassy.
This time, around Amazon is building a more capable variant to create what it hopes will be better suited and customizable for customers. LLMs are capable of using deep learning algorithms to efficiently identify, summarize, and create content from enormous amounts of text data into a usable format. Its use is rapidly developing a whole new type of tech market with seemingly endless potential uses.
“We have a vision, which we have conviction about that we want to build the world’s best personal assistant. And to do that, it’s difficult. It’s across a lot of domains and it’s a very broad surface area. However, if you think about the advent of Large Language Models and generative AI, it makes the underlying models that much more effective such that I think it really accelerates the possibility of building that world’s best personal assistant.”
The company recently released a limited preview of its new Amazon Bedrock, which is designed to “build generative AI-powered apps via pre-trained models from startups”.
As AI establishes a firm footing in the tech world, other companies are also integrating it into their personal assistants. Apple has been reported to be using LLMs to improve Siri, and it’s almost certain Google will follow suit for Assistant, as well as advanced search options.