Amazon is bringing "natural" conversations to Alexa.
The retail giant has announced a raft of new improvements and features for its tech assistant thanks to a major upgrade with plans to implement a new large language model (LLM).
In a blog post, Daniel Rausch - vice president of Alexa and Fire TV - wrote: "We’ve always thought of Alexa as an evolving service, and we’ve been continuously improving it since the day we introduced it in 2014.
"A longstanding mission has been to make a conversation with Alexa as natural as talking to another human, and with the rapid development of generative AI, what we imagined is now well within reach."
The team has been studying conversation over the past few years, and Rausch pointed to the importance of "body language, knowledge of the person you're talking to, and eye contact".
He explained: "To enable that with Alexa, 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.
"We’ve also focused on reducing latency so conversations flow naturally, without pause, and responses are the right length for voice — not the equivalent of listening to paragraph after paragraph read aloud."
Other upgrades include real-world utility, with the new Alexa LLM being "connected to hundreds of thousands of real-world devices and services via APIs".
Personalisation and context is also important, while Alexa's personality will grow as the device will "have a point of view, making conversations more engaging".
Meanwhile, trust is key and Amazon has vowed to continue to "design experiences to protect our customers’ privacy and security, and to give them control and transparency".
