Amazon is working to boost capability of Alexa. Here's how

Amazon is developing a large language model (LLM) to power its popular voice-enabled assistant Alexa, the company's chief executive officer Andy Jassy said.

Large language models are basically deep learning algorithmis that can recognise, summarise, translate, predict and generate text and other content.

The Amazon CEO said that the company does have an LLM which powers Alexa, but it is working on developing one model which is more capable than the current one, Tech Crunch reported. According to Jassy, an improved LLM will help the company in working towards it goal of building the world's ‘best personal assistant’. However, he said it will be difficult to do so across several domains.

During Amazon's first quarter earnings, Jassy reiterated the company's vision of building the world's best personal assistant and acknowledged it would be difficult across a lot of domains. However, he acknowledged that the advent of LLM and generative AI has made such models more effective.

Jassy added that he believed Amazon had a good starting with Alexa due to a couple of ‘hundred million endpoints’ being used across entertainment, shopping and smart phones. The chief executive said that the company is building a LLM which is not only larger, but more generalised and capable.

Jassy added that company has invested in AI and LLMs for years. Amazon unveiled Bedrock which provides a way in building generative AI-powered apps through pre-trained models.

OpenAI's ChatGPT has dominated the internet space and amassed huge popularity. Several tech majors are now looking at incorporating large language model-based improvements to keep abreast of the AI space.

Amazon is not the only tech giant to mention AI during its quarterly call. Microsoft, Meta and Google parent Alphabet have also emphasised their investments in LLM.

Alphabet chief executive officer Sundar Pichai has said that Google will continue to incorporate artificial intelligence to advance search capabilities. Microsoft's Satya Nadella said the technology giant will continue to invest in AI, given that his company has already witnessed a rise in usage for Bing.