Inside Amazon's attempt to reinvent Alexa for the new era of AI
GeekWire
GeekWire
4.4 • 116 Ratings
🗓️ 29 March 2025
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: A conversation with Daniel Rausch, Amazon’s vice president of Alexa and Echo, recorded at the company’s Seattle headquarters.
Rausch explained the company’s vision for Alexa+, Amazon's next-generation voice assistant, in advance of its upcoming rollout through an early access program. Alexa+ promises more fluid conversations with users, integrating with more services and devices for new capabilities, including the ability act autonomously on behalf of a user.
It's a significant upgrade for Amazon's longtime voice assistant, judging from the live demos that Rausch walked us through before and after the podcast recording.
But it remains to be seen how much value people will find in using their voice in those situations, rather than the tried-and-true simplicity of using a smartphone app or web browser. And at a fundamental level, Amazon is playing catch-up with OpenAI's ChatGPT and many other AI chatbots in the world of conversational artificial intelligence.
Related links:
- What Alexa’s AI upgrade means for Amazon’s business and Alexa users
- Amazon’s new Alexa+ uses generative AI to personalize conversations and automate tasks
With GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop; Edited by Curt Milton
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This Geekwire podcast is brought to you by BECU. Stay tuned to the break as Brian Westbrook |
| 0:06.0 | interviews BECU's Stacey Black for today's money hack about the benefits of micro-savings as part of a larger saving strategy. |
| 0:14.5 | For more money hacks, check out geekwire.com slash BECU. |
| 0:19.3 | We talked about Suno at our event a few weeks ago. |
| 0:23.4 | Suno is an agent that builds music generatively, and you just give it, you know, some ideas. |
| 0:29.2 | I need a song about, you know, Red Sox Spring Training, make it a country Western song. |
| 0:33.7 | For developers, it's different, unique, and powerful ways of integrating with Alexa Plus. |
| 0:38.5 | I have to push back on something you just said there because clearly the Red Sox song would be classic rock 1970s. I'm sorry. |
| 0:48.8 | Hi, and welcome to Geekwire from Geekwire.com in Seattle. I'm Todd Bishop. We are coming to you from Amazon's Day One Tower today. |
| 0:56.5 | It's my pleasure to be joined by Daniel Roush. He is the vice president of Alexa and Echo at Amazon. |
| 1:02.7 | It's great to have you here, Daniel. That's awesome to be here, Todd. Thanks for coming to visit us. |
| 1:06.3 | Absolutely. So we just saw a little bit of a demo of Alexa Plus, which is the new interface. |
| 1:13.0 | And really, that doesn't even do it justice, I think, to say what this new experience is that Amazon has created for Alexa users. |
| 1:21.8 | Can you give me sort of the basics for people who might have missed this announcement, Alexa users who might have Echo |
| 1:28.1 | devices on their tabletops that will be compatible with this. What can they expect when this |
| 1:33.6 | starts to roll out in terms of differences from the current experience? Sure, yeah. Alexa Plus is the |
| 1:38.5 | all-new Alexa. I would say the first thing customers will notice is just how conversational the |
| 1:42.9 | experience is. You can have a chat with Alexa, just like you and I are having right now. |
| 1:48.1 | The next thing they'll notice is that Alexa is deeply knowledgeable on just a very wide range of topics. |
| 1:53.8 | You and I were just chatting through Red Sox trivia, and I'm pretty deep on the Red Sox, and I learn something every time that I engage with Alexa on the Red Sox. |
| 2:01.7 | I think that customers will notice that the experience gets very personalized over time, as Alexa learns your preferences. |
| 2:08.7 | You know, Alexa knows I love 90s rock and indie music and bands like the Pixies. |
... |
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