Amazon has announced the next generation of the Amazon AI-powered Alexa digital assistant, which is designed to sound and feel much more like a real person.
One of the key changes in the new Alexa will be not keep on having to restate the “Alexa” wake word.
At the launch event, Amazon senior vice president of devices David Limp demonstrated this by holding a conversation with Alexa, and even asking, “How are you?” rather than the typical digital assistant request, as part of the interaction.
Meanwhile, Amazon’s Alexa vice president David Rausch outlined the company’s five pillars for this next generation of Alexa over at the Amazon blog.
These are conversation, real-world utility, “personalisation and context”, personality and trust, and it goes beyond just a pure speech-driven interaction.
“We fused the input from the sensors in an Echo — the camera, voice input, its ability to detect presence — with AI models that can understand those non-verbal cues,” says Rausch.
Alexa will also appear to know about you even more brazenly than it does today. “Just as a conversation with another person would be shaped by context — such as your previous conversations or the situational context — Alexa needs to do the same,” says Rausch.
Amazon says this is based on its new conversational speech recognition (CSR) engine, built around large language models (LLM), which you may be familiar with if you have read up around technologies like ChatGPT.
“Ask Alexa if your team won, and it will respond in a joyful voice if so; if they lost, the response is more empathetic. Ask Alexa for an opinion, and the response will be more enthusiastic, as it would if a friend was sharing a point of view,” Amazon says of the new approach to speech synthesis.
You can hear a comparison of how this next-gen Alexa will sound when it arrives next year, versus the original 2015 Alexa, over at the About Amazon website.
Does this all sound a bit creepy? You won’t be alone, and it brings up some perennial questions about privacy in the context of home assistants like Alexa. Namely, if Alexa now relies much less on the wake word, how much more actively will it have to listen than it currently does, and for how long?
Amazon says this new version of Alexa will be available to US customers “soon” in preview form. As in the YouTube video above, you’ll say “let’s chat” to get a taste of this new form of assistant interaction.
Amazon Echo devices
Alongside this next-gen Alexa, Amazon announced a stack of new devices that feature the digital assistant.
These include the Echo Frames, a pair of glasses with microphones, speakers, and a camera built-in, to allow for hands-free Alexa requests. This is the third generation of Amazon’s Alexa glasses. The original pair was released in 2020.
Amazon also showed off the Echo Show 8, a smart display with improved sound and a centred camera. The current version of the Show 8 has the camera off to the side, which can look odd during video calls.
The new Echo Hub is like an Echo Show without the camera, as it’s intended to be a touch surface for all your smart home gadgets. It costs £169.99 and is listed as “coming soon” at present.
There are also new Echo Pop Kids smart speaker designs, to get your children indoctrinated in the ways of Alexa early, with Marvel or Disney face plates. These are versions of the standard Echo Pop, announced in May.
