Alexa gets AI skills: characters, music and 20-questions.

Amazon announced new generative AI capabilities for Alexa at CES 2023. Three developers - Character.AI, Splash, and Volley - introduced Alexa skills powered by large language models.

What’s going on here?

Amazon is partnering with AI startups to make their capabilities accessible by Alexa.

What does that mean?

The integration for these AI tools via Alexa let you use their primary feature by chatting with Alexa. For example, Character.AI's skill lets you chat with different fictional personas like a librarian or personal trainer.

Similarly, Splash's skill generates custom songs when you sing or rap lyrics. Volley’s integration creates a modern "20 Questions" game, with Alexa asking intelligent questions based on your answers.

Why should I care?

Amazon’s been putting LLMs in Alexa. They recently added an LLM in the backend for Alexa to make it sound less robotic. With this new release, they are taking the approach of partnership.

There are many LLM in your hand startups that are getting attention these days, but for home assistants and bigger entertainment devices, Google and Amazon are still the major players.