Amazon is gearing up to relaunch its Alexa voice-powered digital assistant as an artificial intelligence “agent” that can complete practical tasks, as the tech group races to resolve the challenges that have dogged the system’s AI overhaul.

The $2.4 trillion company has for the past two years sought to redesign Alexa, its conversational system embedded within 500 million consumer devices worldwide, so the software’s “brain” is transplanted with generative AI.

Rohit Prasad, who leads the artificial general intelligence (AGI) team at Amazon, told the Financial Times the voice assistant still needed to surmount several technical hurdles before the rollout.

This includes solving the problem of “hallucinations” or fabricated answers, its response speed or “latency,” and reliability. “Hallucinations have to be close to zero,” said Prasad. “It’s still an open problem in the industry, but we are working extremely hard on it.”

Poster Comment:

(I never pay attention to AI. Machines do not have integrity.)