Alexa entrusts herself to AI to rise to butler | technology


Voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, Ok Google, or Bixby are basically handy music players, quick responders to simple questions, digital picture frames (those with a screen), alarm clock, or toggle switch. But these functions, which can also be performed using mobile phones, do not in themselves guarantee their viability in the future. Voice trading was one of the pillars of its development (Voice trade), a sector that the consulting firm Nielsen predicts will account for 2% of purchases in 2025. While waiting for this option to merge, large technology companies such as Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Meta or Elon Musk have focused on the possibilities that generative AI can offer their products. Giant Amazon has its own strategy: use this new tool to make Alexa the center of the home, the connection point for all home appliances, the computer for daily actions and routines, and a personal butler.

Alexa is built into more than 300 million devices from Amazon and other brands. Despite this breakthrough, some media outlets described it as a major failure for the company. Vishal Sharma, Vice President at Amazon and Head of Artificial Intelligence at Alexa, denies this, saying, “It has never been a failure. If you look at the usage stats or the number of connected devices, you can see that it has increased.” According to the company, interactions with the assistant grew by more than 30% last year in the world (in Spain it claims the increase was 40%) and half of users used it for purchases.

Alexa has never been a failure. If you look at the usage stats or the number of connected devices, you can see that they have increased

Vishal Sharma, Vice President at Amazon and Head of Artificial Intelligence at Alexa

Sharma, during a meeting with the international press, to which EL PAÍS was invited, argues that the company, far from letting the assistant languish, has doubled its commitment to it to take advantage of advances in artificial intelligence and turn it into a nerve center. from home.

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The reason is explained by Dave Limp, who is also the company’s vice president and president of Devices and Services. “The mobile phone has driven most of the innovations in the industry: miniaturized cameras, new sensors, batteries…but the home, where we spend most of our time, has been ignored.”

“The home is incredibly manual. The industry has been automating other areas, but not the home. So we developed this vision which consists of home working for the benefit of those who live in it, doing chores, and being proactive.” [anticiparse a partir del aprendizaje de rutinas]. It’s what we call ambient intelligence, Lemp sums up.

Amazon's Smart Home Lab, where Alexa integration with all home devices has been tested, in early May.
Amazon’s Smart Home Lab, where Alexa integration with all home devices has been tested, in early May.Country

Sharma explains that such automation through spoken commands has never happened before because of the complexity involved in the inhomogeneity of sounds and the presence of noise that must be distinguished to give a “reliable” response, which he considers to be one of the keys to the system: if you are asked to turn on a light, do it and be it.

The other key is routine, which is that the assistant understands that a series of repetitive actions respond to a habitual pattern and combines them under a single command.

The mobile phone has been the driver behind most of the innovations in the industry. But home, where we spend much of our time, has been ignored.

Dave Limp, Amazon Vice President of Devices and Services

Marga Koopmans, Director of the Smart Home Lab, shows it in a clone of a home at Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle (USA). If you say, “Alexa, I’m leaving,” the assistant locks the door and automatically turns off all lights and appliances, except for those programmed to work when family is away, like the vacuum cleaner. When Alexa wakes her up, she turns on the lights, reports the current and forecast weather, reads the calendar aloud, and starts the shower and coffee maker.

Koopmans explains four main reasons for the development of this smart home: it makes tasks easier, provides entertainment (music, TV, games…), provides security for people (mainly elderly and children) and property (remote monitoring of the home) and is more sustainable, by facilitating Turn off unused devices.

For Vishal Sharma, integrating all devices into one assistant offers a huge advantage over a mobile phone, which can perform similar functions, or a manual procedure: “It doesn’t require you to pick up your phone and do like 1,800 things or have to go through the whole place. It just works.” Without worrying about the technology behind it.”

Our policy is not so much to make money with the hardware as it is to use it

Vishal Sharma

Prices vary depending on the device used as a command center (between 100 and 250 euros), the smart plugs used (from nine euros per unit), and compatible electrical appliances purchased or purchased. It can be connected to items that integrate with Alexa (such as the Fire TV Stick or Cube). “Our policy is not so much to make money from hardware as it is to use,” says Sharma.

The biggest challenge of connected life is data security and privacy. Mattia Epifani, a digital forensic pathologist and instructor at the SANS Institute, says MIT Technology Review: “It could be a location, a message, a photo… It could be anything. It could also be a user’s heart rate or the number of steps they took. And basically all of those things are stored in electronic devices.”

Laila Rouhi, Amazon’s head of trust and privacy, admits that it’s a priority, that mistakes have been made and that they’ve learned from them. “If we make a mistake, we break the user’s trust and it’s very difficult for us to get it back. That’s why it’s really important that we think about privacy and trust, which means investing in end-to-end AI to ensure that.”

To my soul, the basic principles are transparency, “never sell users’ personal information” and always give them the option not to log data, images or sounds.

We do not sell users’ personal information

Laila Rouhi, Amazon’s Chief Trust and Privacy Officer

This commitment runs counter to the ever-present need for hardware to learn through experience. To distinguish the voice of a child or an elderly person, a woman or a man, or the different dialects of the same language, machines must have examples. Amazon claims that supervised learning is used for this task, with constant checks.

Sharma insists that the issue of security and privacy is taken very seriously. “We’re very transparent about what’s going on beneath the surface and the possibility of erasing what you want forever is always there,” he says.

In addition to supervised learning, some devices only store information internally or do not record any information unless it is activated on purpose. But the use of data is essential. Alexa’s intelligence director explains it analogously: “If you talk to a friend, you want them to remember what you said, especially if that friend is doing things for you, helping you.” But, he concludes, “we will move heaven and earth to protect privacy and ensure security.”

Speed ​​racing for giants

The strategy of spreading artificial intelligence (AI) across the board is popular among tech giants, but it becomes a fast-paced race when the industry shows signs of recovery.

Microsoft has invested $10 billion in OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT chatbot that it has integrated into its Bing search engine. But it’s only one step. The multinational has stated that it will integrate AI into other products because, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, it opens up a “new era of computing”.

Back in March, South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung rocked the tech sector by admitting that it was considering replacing Google with Bing as the default search engine on its devices.

Google’s response has been to accelerate the creation of new AI systems and to update existing systems with AI features. The goal of the project, called Magi, is to provide users, as in Amazon’s strategy, with a personalized experience, anticipating users’ needs.

In the face of ChatGPT, Google responded urgently with Bard. But artificial intelligence is not new to the company. Its subsidiary, DeepMind, has spent years looking for its application in language models and autonomous cars, as well as in its search engine, in music-playing functions, or even in programming.

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai on May 10 while presenting artificial intelligence tools at the company's headquarters in California.
Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai on May 10 while presenting artificial intelligence tools at the company’s headquarters in California.Jeff Chew (AP)

Even Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, the new owner of Twitter and founder of SpaceX, has joined the race, despite being warned about the potential dangers of this technology. according to New York timesMusk intends to create a new artificial intelligence company called X.AI and compete with ChatGPT.

Amazon itself, in its Web Services (AWS) division, has made natural language models (LLMs) for big language model), grouped under the Titan name, and a cloud computing service called Bedrock for “creating and extending generative AI applications,” such as creating text, images, voice, and data on demand.

This month, Meta introduced a new open-source tool called ImageBind that, according to the company, will be able to associate objects in an image with their sound, 3D shape, or motion and create images from the noise. In the future they aspire to endow the machine with sensitivities such as touch and smell, bringing it closer to human capabilities. Another open source AI tool is LLM Meta AI, which aims to compete with ChatGPT and other similar applications.

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