Amazon's Voice Assistant Integrated with Generative AI

Amazon.com unveiled a slew of new and refreshed devices on Sep 20 and updated its Alexa voice assistant with generative artificial intelligence to entice users away from the unprofitable product as competition from chatbots like Google's Bard grows.

Alexa will converse more naturally, abandoning its robotic tone of nearly a decade, and answer questions such as football game start times and recipe ideas. Amazon demonstrated the device's ability to compose and recite poems at the company's annual product launch in Arlington, Virginia.

Amazon launched Alexa in 2014, but has yet to find a consistent way to make it profitable, instead driving customers to the company's website for additional purchases. The service, which is typically accessed through speakers or enabled televisions, provides spoken responses to user queries such as the local weather and can serve as a hub to control home appliances.

The Seattle-based company has worked to improve Alexa, particularly since OpenAI's ChatGPT debuted in November with longform written responses to complex queries. Similar chatbots have sparked a frenzy of investment in generative AI startups.

"You can now have near-human-like conversations with Alexa," Amazon's hardware chief, Dave Limp, said at the event.