Amazon to Rebrand Alexa as an AI Agent

Global e-commerce giant Amazon is set to ‘relaunch’ its digital assistant Alexa as an artificial intelligence agent.  For the past two years, the company has been reportedly working on redesigning Alexa and integrating generative AI. 

Amazon wanted Alexa to go beyond performing simple tasks like setting alarms and reminders or playing music to more practical tasks using AI. 

Rohit Prasad, the head scientist at Amazon’s AGI (artificial general intelligence) team, said that in order to function as an AI agent, Alexa must be able to call hundreds of third-party software and services. He added that the company’s Nova models were built with Alexa’s needs in mind. 

However, several employees revealed that Amazon encountered numerous challenges, involving hallucinations, latency, and reliability, to transform Alexa into an AI agent. “Hallucinations have to be close to zero,” said Prasad, adding that the company is ‘working extremely hard on it’. 

Rebranding Alexa as an AI agent is expected to improve the product’s functionality and sales. A study from Mountain Research suggests that over 70% of consumers would prefer products that explicitly disclose the use of AI. 

“While most consumers haven’t used AI firsthand, they remain interested or excited in the technology as long as it’s not hurting people and brands are being transparent with its usage. The opportunities it offers are virtually limitless,” read the report. 

While Alexa does use AI to accomplish the tasks it can today, there’s very little disclosure around this. 

Voice-based AI agents will surely be on the rise in 2025. At the end of last year, Hume AI, the voice-to-voice ‘conversational’ assistant, explored a new capability powered by Anthropic Claude’s Computer Use.

Hume AI converts voice commands to text that Claude can recognise, which is then translated into actions that Computer Use performs. To demonstrate its capabilities, Hume AI was taken to X, where a user verbally instructed Hume AI and Computer Use to play chess on a web browser. 

Once Alexa is rebranded as an AI agent, it would be interesting to see if Amazon explores Computer Use capabilities. Anthropic was one of the first companies to build an autonomous computer use agent, followed by Microsoft’s Copilot Vision and Google’s Project Manager. 

Claude’s tool, however, has found the first-mover advantage. Many companies integrate it into their workflows, and developers build unique use cases with it. Amazon is one of Anthropic’s largest investors, investing $4 billion in the AI startup in March 2024.