Amazon's new Alexa

Welcome back to The Daily Update — Amazon just unveiled a flurry of new products and features and I’ve got the biggest announcements for you here.

🗞️ The Latest: Amazon brings generative AI to Alexa and smart home devices

🤖 AI Training: How to use Bard’s new features

📸 Business Spotlight: Shaq backs AI-powered edtech startup

🚨 AI Roundup: Four quick hits

Read time: 2 minutes

🗞️ The Latest: Amazon brings generative AI to Alexa and smart home devices

Yesterday Amazon held its fall product announcement at its HQ2 campus in Arlington, Virginia. The company unveiled details on the newest AI-powered upgrades for Alexa and Amazon’s smart home platform.

What you need to know:

• Amazon announced that a new generative AI model will power improved experiences across its Echo family of devices.

• The new Alexa large language model is optimized for conversational experiences, and can take into account body language as well as a person’s eye contact and gestures.

• Other new capabilities include responding to multiple requests at once, improved contextual understanding and controlling third-party products like robot vacuums.

• The new Alexa can adjust its tone and responses to express affirmation, excitement, laughter and surprise. It sounds like Alexa is getting a bigger, more opinionated personality.

• Amazon is rolling out the new Alexa slowly through a preview program in the U.S.

Why it matters: While digital assistants have always included AI elements, they’ve lacked complex processing abilities and human-like interactions that generative AI is capable of. Smart homes will be supercharged by this update, although a human-like Alexa may be unsettling to some.

🤖 AI Training: How to use Bard’s new features

Yesterday I shared Google’s new updates to its Bard chatbot. Here’s how you can take advantage of the new features by integrating Bard into other Workspace apps:

Step 1: Go to bard.google.com and click on the puzzle icon in the top right corner.

Step 2: Toggle the apps you want to integrate (Flights, Hotels, Maps, Workspace and YouTube).

Step 3: Ask Bard to find information for you with these example prompts:

• “Summarize today’s email from The Daily Update.”

• “Find YouTube videos that I haven’t watched related to my browsing interests.”

• “Find the document about [subject] and summarize the most important information in 10 bullet points.”

📸 Business Spotlight: Shaq backs AI-powered edtech startup

Former NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal recently led Edsoma’s seed funding round that raised $2.5 million.

Key points:

• Founded by Kyle Wallgren, Edsoma is a startup that developed an AI-powered reading, education and communication platform for children.

• The app uses an AI reading assistant to help kids improve their reading and communication.

• The free version allows one child user and up to three books. A monthly $9.99 version expands it to four users, unlimited books, group video calling and peer reading sessions.

• Edsoma has accumulated 9,000 paid users in just two months, and may eventually expand to teaching reading in languages besides English.

Crucial quote: “When [Wallgren] talked about it, I didn’t believe it. And then when he showed me, I believed it,” O’Neal said.

The bottom line: AI has the potential to democratize learning for kids around the world. Edsoma’s platform is a big win for the future of education.

🚨 AI Roundup: Four quick hits

• Timely Upgrades: OpenAI unveiled its DALL-E 3 image generator and incorporated the technology into ChatGPT.

• Coding Copilots: Github’s AI-powered coding assistant is now available to individuals.

• AI Controversy: Teens in Spain say people are making AI-generated nudes of them and distributing the pictures in schools. A Spanish lawyer says spreading such photos is punishable by up to nine years in prison.

• Copyright Concerns: The Authors Guild and 17 well-know authors sue OpenAI for copyright infringement. The group includes Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and Jodi Picoult.

Have questions or thoughts on today’s newsletter? Reply to this email and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks for reading The Daily Update!

Jack

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