New Echo and Fire TVs aside, generative AI is the big leap for Amazon’s Alexa

It perhaps could have happened sooner, as artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots with large language models (LLMs) as underliers have caught our collective attention over the past year. ‘Better late than never’ is perhaps how one would describe Amazon’s next big upgrade for the Alexa virtual assistant. At its annual keynote that focused on Alexa and its accompanying smart device ecosystem, Amazon confirms Alexa is ready to find a new large language model as its foundation.

While it is already true to an extent, using generative AI is expected to give Alexa the sort of finesse with conversational capabilities, that it presently perhaps doesn’t have the tools to achieve. In a way, the evolution of chatbots has been so rapid, voice assistants quickly went from being exciting, futuristic tech to basic tools one now expects as par for the course, on a smart speaker or a smartphone.