Amazon’s annual fall product launch was full of new devices — and a fresh take on Alexa using generative AI for more natural conversations.
Amazon’s fall hardware event was chock full of updates. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the generative AI boom from the last year, the company began transforming Alexa into a much more versatile and conversational personal chatbot. But it also had plenty of new hardware to introduce, with new models of the Echo Show, security cameras, Echo Frames, a 10-gigabit router and more. Here’s everything Amazon unveiled on Wednesday.
As generative AI has exploded in popularity during the last year, task-focused personal assistants like Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa now seem even more dated than they did before. Amazon began to rectify that on Wednesday with a new Alexa chat feature that responds to a much wider variety of requests by using generative AI. When saying, “Alexa, let’s chat,” the assistant switches to a chatbot mode built on a large language model (LLM).
Alexa’s new AI chat mode makes the assistant more conversational and expressive, and you won’t need to keep repeating “Alexa” each time you speak. If you enroll in the company’s Visual ID, you can start a conversation just by facing the screen on an Echo device with a camera. Alexa can now adjust its tone and “emotion” based on context. The company says it also works around your pauses and hesitations for a more free-flowing conversation. However, Amazon’s live presentation had a couple of hitches where the assistant forced presenter Dave Limp to repeat himself.
Amazon says Alexa will move further in this direction with an upcoming speech-to-speech update. “And we’re working on a new model—which we refer to as speech-to-speech,” said Amazon senior VP Rohit Prasad. “Instead of first converting a customer’s audio request into text using speech recognition, and then using an LLM to generate a text response or an action, and then text-to-speech to produce audio back—this new model will unify these tasks, creating a much richer conversational experience.”
Amazon launched a new Echo Show 8 on Wednesday, boasting upgrades to its display, camera and microphones. Proximity sensing is a marquee feature on the new model, as it can adjust its UI depending on how close you are to it. For example, a demo showing the weather app used a larger font as the person stood farther away, but it shrunk the font and added finer details as they moved closer.
The device includes spatial audio capabilities for “a wider and more immersive sound experience,” as Limp described. The Echo Show 8 also has a centered camera, which should make video calls feel more natural for your partner, and upgraded audio that minimizes background noise. It also has a faster processor and a built-in smart home hub.
The new Echo Show 8 costs $150 and is available for pre-order now ahead of an expected October ship date.
Amazon updated its Echo Frames smart glasses for the first time in over two years. The wearable device has a longer battery life: up to six hours of continuous media playback. Perhaps even more importantly, the new models are 15 percent slimmer than the previous generation, making them look more like regular glasses and less like a bulky tech product strapped to your face.
The new Echo Frames also have a “redesigned audio experience,” including more balanced sound, better audio clarity and less distortion. Their onboard speech processing is also improved, which could lead to more reliable responses in different environments. They’ll ship in seven new styles, including both glasses and sunglasses variants.
