‘Alexa is not just getting smarter but relatable with generative AI,’ says Amazon’s Rohit Prasad

Amazon has recently announced that its voice assistant Alexa now comes with generative AI capabilities, which is a huge step for the company. Tech Today’s Aayush Ailawadi talks to Rohit Prasad, an AI Scientist at Amazon who also happens to be the brain behind Alexa. Prasad stated that with the new AI updates, Alexa has become more conversational while still giving personalised responses.

Talking about the major update, Prasad told Tech Today, “We have taken a big step, which is to take generative AI and make it useful in homes through a personal AI that is there for you when you need it, and it recedes to the background when you don't. And it's happening because we are able to take the powers of generative AI large language models in general and combine it with the real-time devices and services to the scale that no one has done before.”

It also has personal context integrated like what you like to eat, what you like to watch, what you like to listen to and what games you watch. And in addition, we wanted Alexa to be a trusted AI and have a fun personality. He added, “We have aligned this model to be optimal for voice and attractions and homes with people from two years old to 100 years old.”

Prasad believes that making Alexa smarter is not enough, making it relatable is “super important” for the company.

On being asked if he thinks that Amazon will eventually need to be a lot more interoperable, Prasad stated, “I think we have been always all for interoperability as well as giving customers the selection because that's the right thing. If you look at Amazon, it has the largest selection of products we sell. If you look at AWS bedrock, it has multiple LLM providers in there because we want customers to have that selection. If you look at Alexa, we have multiple services and some of them are not our own.”

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