BB Digest: Alexa + Claude

Hey folks, this is another of those crazy AI weeks. We haven’t had one in a while. Every refresh of my Twitter feed had a new launch—all timed together with a Slack outage. Don’t worry, I got the scoop. Let’s get in.

TLDR; inside today’s newsletter

• Alexa’s long-awaited revamp is here

• Replit Agent, Gemini for Code and new voice AI tools

• mid week updates from our community

• top 8 tools from the goldrush

• Everyone gets deep research—startup opportunity

• other news and articles to pay attention to

 🔎 Trends & news

• Alexa+ is Amazon’s genAI assistant. It combines Amazon’s Alexa with LLMs (a mix of Amazon Nova and Claude) to promise a true personal assistant. It’s priced at $20/mo but free for Prime members. 

  • What can you expect? Well, first, a better understanding of what you just said and less need for the robotic commands. Then, all the things you’d use ChatGPT/Claude for but via voice.

  • But Alexa+ can stand out because 1) Alexa has richer access to your life and can remember details about you, and 2) it will use “experts” (integrations to other apps in simple words) to do tasks for you. Kinda like ChatGPT’s Operator.

  As always, features will roll out slowly, starting with select devices in the US, and all that’s demoed doesn’t work as smoothly in real life. Let’s see how this goes.

• Replit released their Agent V2 - It is more autonomous in building your app, just from a prompt. It creates nicer-looking apps and uses the new Claude 3.7 Sonnet model underneath it. Replit Assistant and a dozen other build with AI apps (Bolt, Create, Windsurf) are also using Claude 3.7 Sonnet now.

• ElevenLabs released a new speech-to-text model called Scribe claiming the best performance on automatic speech recognition benchmarks. To complement this Hume AI released their new text-to-speech model Octave with the ability for voice design and emotion control. Both models are integrated in their respective tool stacks ready to use for creators.

• Google is giving away Gemini Code Assist in popular IDEs for free. This free plan has a limit of 180,000 code completions per month (vs Copilot’s meagre 2000 free completions). Also, Gemini 2.0 Flash Lite is generally available now. You might need to update your code if you were using the experimental preview. Our Slack bot had some hiccups.

• Here's everything you need to know about AI agents! Learn how to build, optimize, and scale AI agents with confidence using Galileo's 100-page eBook. Choose the right framework for your goals, tune and evaluate agent performance, and spot and fix failure points before they become issues. Get your copy!*
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💬 Inside the community this week

Become pro to join us building and learning together.

• Sean upgraded his startup's website copy with tools from our workshop with Corey Haines. (link)

• Gerald wants UI/UX inspiration for vibe coding with AI without learning Figma (link)

• Bart is looking for an "AI Integration Checklist" to help businesses identify opportunities. (link)

• Aishwarya is getting builders together for a 3-4 hour mini-hackathon in San Francisco. First session is on March 8th. (link)

• Leo spent 65-70 of his 100 messages on fixing issues with Lovable—it happens 😅. (link)

• Pablo’s facing a deployment issue for his first AI product for real estate (link)

• Justin is amazed by multilingual chats with ChatGPT's advanced voice mode. (link)

• Mario tested Cursor with Claude 3.7, building a mental math game for his granddaughter in just 5 hours. (link)

• Nono asked for a tool that can process podcast audio from Spotify and YouTube. (link)

• Gurpreet built a Gorilla game from DOS times with Claude Code. (link)

• Justin shared a live coding with Cursor stream for inspiration. (link)

• Manish shared a new IDE for smooth code execution (link)

Join the conversation, plus full access to courses and workshops by becoming a pro member today!

⚙️ Top new tools

• Webflow’s AI site builder - bring your site to life with AI – no code required. Your vision, built in minutes, built for scale.*

• Factory AI - Your agentic command centre to plan and build software.

• Exa Websets - Create a perfect list of people or companies matching your requirements.

• Poe Apps - Create mini apps that can use AI and share with users.

• Flora - An intelligent canvas for all your creative AI tools.

• Ellicit Reports - Fully automated research overviews for actual researchers.

• Tolan - Your tiny little AI friend to solve overwhelm, not loneliness.

• Raycast AI Extensions - Turn your everyday language into actions and answers.

More tools here →
*sponsored

👀 What caught my eye… Deep Research expansion

OpenAI’s deep research is now available to all paying ChatGPT users. Plus ($20/mo plan) users get 10 requests a month (same for Team, Edu and Enterprise accounts). Pro accounts ($200/mo plan) get 120 requests a month now (up from 100). OpenAI has also shared a call for domain experts in various fields plus the system card for Deep Research.

Perplexity has also released its version of Deep Research via Sonar API. My POV is that users will want custom versions of Deep Research in their fields that you can build now. Remember, even if ChatGPT allows you to chat with your PDFs, apps in that category are wildly successful.

 📜 Interesting posts

• Free users of ChatGPT now get a version of Advance Voice Mode powered by GPT-4o-mini.

• Chegg sues Google for hurting traffic with AI Overviews.

• ChatGPT clicks convert 6.8x higher than Google organic for this business.

• Activision admits use of GenAI for assets in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

• About a third of workers fear fewer job opportunities in the long run due to AI.

📌 To-dos

That’s it for today. Feel free to hit reply and share your thoughts. 👋