Amazon's latest Alexa is designed to help sort out domestic disarray, such as confirming if the dog has been fed and recalling the name of that eatery everyone expressed interest in.

Turns out, nobody fed the dog and so all the kids “scatter to their corners,” he told Coins2Day’s Brainstorm AI audience in San Francisco on Monday. 

The senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon says the new generative AI-powered Alexa+, which runs on Echo hardware and can integrate with other devices like Amazon’s Ring security cameras, aims to ease the constant mental load in a household: remembering whether the pets ate, restaurants each family member pitched and saw vetoed, and regular grocery orders. The idea is to have “ambient” artificial intelligence around your house so that devices can assist in tasks, chores, and other household command center issues, said Panay.

According to Panay, the updated Alexa+ offers a more natural dialogue, and users no longer need to articulate every word with precision for the virtual assistant to comprehend them.

“She’s the best DJ on the planet, in my opinion,” said Panay. “You have a personal shopper, you have a butler, you have a personal assistant, you have your home manager. Different people use Alexa for different things, and now she’s pretty much supercharged,” Panay said.

Panay mentioned that besides verifying the dogs hadn't eaten, he utilized Alexa+ on Sunday evening to preempt another long-standing family discussion: deciding on a dinner location. He shared with The Brainstorm AI attendees that both meal choices and animal care tasks are “classic fight[s] in my house,”.

His youngest had previously suggested a few restaurants she wanted to visit for a quick bite and hadn’t yet been to, and Panay asked Alexa to remind them which ones his daughter suggested specifically. It was a sushi joint and she enjoyed it, Panay said. That type of ambient listening and assistance with debate is the point, he said, and stops people needing to pull out their phones and start typing and scrolling for information.   

Panay mentioned that Alexa is capable of performing more specific tasks, such as booking a table via the dining service OpenTable, arranging for food delivery through nights in, summoning an Uber, and managing household matters like reporting the quantity of delivered packages or the number of visitors. Panay indicated that Amazon collaborates with over 150 entities to facilitate these integrations, though he acknowledged that further efforts are required to enlist additional partners.  

To date, Alexa+ has been rolled out to early-access users and this week the offering is accessible to individuals on an extended waiting list, according to Panay, and its popularity has been enhanced by Amazon's promotional efforts. This week, the offering is being made available to anyone possessing an Echo device. The company's revenue generation strategy includes “flywheels” from Amazon's $2.4 trillion commerce network, especially concerning purchases of apparel, food, and various other goods. “If you’re shopping on the grocery list and order groceries often enough, Alexa knows what you’re doing, and ultimately, can just order ahead of time for you moving forward,” he stated.

Panay ultimately foresees users desiring “your assistant everywhere you go” due to “the more it understands about you, the more informed it is, the better it can serve your needs.”. Furthermore, although Panay indicated that Amazon will persist with advancements in this domain, he declined to disclose any particular offerings. He mentioned that Amazon possesses a “lab full of ideas,”, but the majority of these concepts won't progress beyond the experimental stage.