- Amazon plans to upgrade its Alexa voice assistant with AI features like ChatGPT.
- One use case cited in internal documentation is to generate bedtime stories based on children’s toys.
- Amazon is responding to the rise of generative AI popularized by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Around 8pm every night in families around the world, parents hear the phrase “tell me a bedtime story” as they put their children to bed for the night.
Amazon has big plans to relaunch the Alexa business by building smarter AI into interactive devices, including new storytelling features for families.
As Insider previously reported, the company is responding to the rise of a technology called generative AI, popularized by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, with its own technology. There, large-scale language model (LLM) AI will be able to study other similar examples and create entirely new ones, like fictional stories.
According to a leaked document, “Alexa LLM Entertainment Use Cases,” seen by an insider about such a plan, Amazon plans to use its own AI technology to build many features into Alexa, centered around home entertainment.
A particularly eye-opening example described in this document allows an 8-year-old user to create a bedtime story about “Mitten, the first cat to go to the moon.” cat and moon ”
Even more amazing, when a child is playing with an interactive Olaf toy, Amazon Echo Show, an Alexa device with a camera, can recognize the toy and incorporate Disney characters into the story.
According to the document, Alexa can also make stories interactive by asking parents and children to add them to the story, or by creating concept art on the Echo Show screen. The document states that such features could lead to partnership opportunities with Disney, Lego, and others.
“Alexa will use LLM to generate a new five-minute story using the provided context and configured defaults, saving the story’s context for future interactions,” the document reads. is listed.
It’s not clear from this document when Amazon will make such a feature available. But Amazon hopes the feature will tweak a longtime request for sleepy kids to “Alexa, tell bedtime stories” once it’s released.
