Amazon had been planning to roll out a brand new Alexa powered by generative AI in October 2024, however that clearly didn't occur. In response to reviews that got here out again then, the corporate pushed again its new voice assistant's launch to someday this yr. Now, a brand new report by The Financial Times says the corporate nonetheless wants to have the ability to overcome "a number of technical hurdles" earlier than it may possibly launch a extra highly effective model of Alexa. One of many predominant issues it has to resolve is "hallucinations," that are incorrect or false outcomes that generative AIs produce at occasions.
Hallucinations need to be "near zero," Rohit Prasad, chief of Amazon's synthetic common intelligence (AGI) group instructed FT. Since folks have a tendency to make use of Alexa all through the day, it may find yourself spitting out a whole lot of false data if Amazon fails to deal with the problem. Prasad admits that hallucinations are "nonetheless an open drawback within the business," however his group is "working extraordinarily exhausting on it." Amazon additionally has to work Alexa's response velocity or latency, as a result of customers anticipate to get a response rapidly after they ask the assistant a query or after they ask it to carry out a job.
The Amazon AGI lead stated that getting Alexa to that final mile has been actually exhausting. "Typically we underestimate what number of providers are built-in into Alexa, and it’s a large quantity," he instructed FT. His group has to make sure that the brand new assistant will have the ability to work with a whole lot of third-party apps and providers. The brand new Alexa is predicted to be powered by Anthropic’s Claude AI and the corporate's in-house Amazon Nova fashions, and it’ll reportedly require a subscription as a method for the corporate to earn money. Nevertheless it nonetheless has no strong launch date, and primarily based on what a present worker instructed the publication, it's not rolling out anytime quickly. Amazon nonetheless has a whole lot of issues to do, they stated, reminiscent of ensuring it really works "near 100% of the time," including youngster security filters and testing Alexa varied integrations.
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