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Amazon’s clear ambition to become a part of everyone’s daily life was on display this week at its annual hardware event. It announced a host of new Alexa-powered gadgets, including a home surveillance drone, a suite of Ring-brand car alarm systems, and a variety like a toddler’s adorable Echo gadget. But it’s clear that Amazon’s strategy has changed, if only for a product cycle, from broad to deep.
Last year, Amazon added its virtual assistant to any home device that could accommodate a chip. His list of new widgets with Alexa seemed a mile long, and this included a collection of household items like lamps and microwaves. The company also announced device partnerships that ensure that Alexa would live on some devices alongside other virtual assistants, tools to make it easier for developers to build Alexa skills, network and wearable devices and capabilities. It was a game of volume and an aggressive offering to further develop its ecosystem in even more markets.
This year, Amazon had fewer devices to advertise, but it highlighted how it made Alexa better than ever. That’s the second part of the strategy here: take Alexa everywhere, then improve the marquee feature so that the user experience outshines everything the competition has to offer.
As is always the case at these types of events, Amazon talked big and dreamy about all the new Alexa features. Users will find out for themselves if this is the real deal or just a hype when Amazon releases updates over the course of the next year (they will land on smart home devices first). But on paper and in staged demos, Alexa’s new capabilities would certainly seem to be one step closer to the holy grail of feeling that talking to a virtual assistant is like talking to a person.
That’s the crux of what Amazon says it has done to improve Alexa, infusing it with AI to make it more human. This includes picking up nuances in speech and adjusting your own cadence, asking your human interlocutor for clarification to complete the knowledge, and using comments like “Alexa, that’s wrong” to learn and correct yourself.
Amazon is particularly proud of new natural turn-taking abilities, which help Alexa understand the weaknesses of human conversation. For example, in a staged demonstration, two friends talked about ordering a pizza through an Alexa device. Like normal humans, they did not use each other’s names in conversation, paused to think, changed their minds, and adjusted the order, and so on. Alexa “knew” when to intervene, as well as when they were talking to each other and not to the Alexa device.
At the event, Rohit Prasad, Alexa Vice President and Senior Scientist, said this required a “real invention” and that the team went beyond natural language processing (NLP) and embraced multisensory AI: acoustic, linguistic and visual cues. . And, he said, all of that happens locally, on the device itself.
This is thanks to Amazon’s new AZ1 Neural Edge processor, which is designed to accelerate machine learning applications on the device rather than in the cloud. On the event’s live blog, Amazon said: “With AZ1, powerful inference engines can run quickly on the edge, starting with a fully neural speech recognition model that will process speech faster, making Alexa even more responsive. ” Few details are available about the chip, but it likely heralds a near future where Alexa devices can perform more meaningful virtual assistance without an internet connection.
Given the complete lack of information on AZ1, it is impossible to say what it can or cannot do. But it would be a potential game changer if you could handle all the new Alexa tricks on devices as simple as an Echo smart speaker. There could also be positive privacy implications if users could enjoy a powerful new Alexa on the device, thus keeping their voice recordings away from the Amazon cloud.
But digging deeper for Amazon isn’t just about a more human Alexa; It involves drawing people more into its ecosystem, which Amazon hopes is the sum of adding the ubiquity of devices and services to more compelling user experiences.
Part of that effort is focused on Ring devices, which now include not only home security products for entry doors, but also car security products and a small autonomous drone for the interior of your home. They are basically surveillance devices, and together, they are an ecosystem of surveillance devices and services that Amazon owns and that connects to law enforcement. You can buy it as deep as you like, creating a surveillance bubble inside your home, around your home, and aboard your vehicles, regardless of where you’ve parked them. The tension on Ring devices, what and to whom they record, where those recordings go, and who uses them for what purpose, will only be amplified with this home drone and car alarm and camera.
Whether deepening or expanding, what has not changed is that Amazon wants to be ubiquitous in our lives. With the value of new devices and capabilities from each event, the company takes another step towards that goal.
