Amazon Surpasses 500M Alexa Devices and Claims to Have Been in Generative AI All Along
Yes and No on this one
It’s okay to be late for the party. But this is hard for companies that pride themselves on innovation. Amazon has been developing large language models (LLM) for some time. That makes it fair for the company to say it is not a newcomer. However, there is a difference between creating a market, leading a market, and trailing a market.
500 Million Alexa Devices
First, let’s give Amazon some credit. Apple may have launched the voice assistant era with Siri, but Alexa popularized it. And they did it the hard way. Voice-activated smart home devices are a multi-billion dollar annual market. No one worked harder than Amazon to create that market, and it was rewarded with a dominant market share in many markets and second only to Google, a handful.
The company was so successful that it sold over 500 million Alex devices. A couple of new devices and updates to the existing products were announced today.
However, Alexa involved generative AI only in the conventional synthetic speech generation product category. There is a lot of AI used in intent recognition bu the responses are pre-defined and not generative.
That is why it seems disonnant to hear stories bout Alexa being generative all along. CNBC reported earlier today
However, Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa, said it’s wrong to think the e-retailer has missed out in generative AI, which allows people to convert text-based queries into creative and thorough answers.
“Alexa has been and is at the forefront of AI for a long time,” Prasad told CNBC in an interview. “We’ve been part of the cultural zeitgeist and it hasn’t slowed down.”
Prasad added that contrary to ChatGPT, which remains accessible through a web browser, Alexa is an “instantly available, personal AI” that people can communicate with by voice.
Notice the emphasis on AI and not generative AI. Marketing spin, for the most part. With that said, Amazon is a leader in AI and a relatively new competitor in generative AI.
Is Amazon Really in Generative AI?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is definitely in the generative AI business as of April 2023. That is when the company announced its Bedrock AI suite of generative AI models. The company highlighted three third-party generative AI tools while also introducing its own GPT-style model named Titan. It also introduced CodeWhisper, which generates software code for developers.
Amazon has had its own internal LLM for at least a year. It was just a secret and didn’t get a lot of attention. It was used with an Alexa product that was announced in December that created fun stories for kids.
The secrecy was greater than Google’s, and almost no one inside or outside of Amazon even knew the products existed. Both are playing catch-up to OpenAI, which seems to have its flywheel in acceleration mode. By the way, Amazon doesn’t have to worry too much. This marker is still early. It will take a while to get Amazon’s generative AI flywheel spinning, but they have started the process.
Are the Responses Pre-defined?
To gauge whether an AI-based assistant or copilot application is generative, look at the responses. Traditional voice assistants built on natural language understanding (NLU) are not generative. It is AI at the input and pre-defined responses on the output. That is Alexa!
If the responses to interactions are unknown, you are very likely working with a generative AI system. There are some experiments underway that blend NLU and LLM functionality. This means some responses are pre-defined, and some are wholly generated at the time of the prompt. I expect this to be the common implementation methodology no later than 2024.
Amazon’s Different Innovation Cycle
Amazon is simply on a different innovation cycle. It created the market for far-field voice-activated devices. It also was a big innovator in cloud computing. The company doesn’t have to be first in every market.
I have said on the GAIN YouTube show and in the Voicebot Podcast that the Alexa prize was achieved the day ChatGPT launched. The NLU-based Alexa couldn’t meet the standard. ChatGPT achieved and surpassed the Alexa prize standard upon launch.
This timing of ChatGPT and the core generative AI use case success stories was inopportune for Amazon, given the pullback in devices and layoffs in 2022. That time is past. The new era of generative AI copilots for nearly every task is underway, and Amazon is now putting both feet to the fire.
It appears Alexa may be getting a generative AI makeover. Let’s see how far Amazon takes this or if it decides to err on the side of caution and remain mostly NLU-based. Regardless, AWS will be pushing generative AI hard because that is what its users want in 2023.
