The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon, looking to maintain its edge in what the paper calls the “artificial-intelligence assistants” game, now is “adding hundreds of engineers to the Alexa program and giving it hiring preference over other division.”
Sources tell the Journal that “ Amazon executives are eyeing a land rush they have created, with new or planned devices using similar virtual assistants from Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. All four rivals have access to different, deeper pools of data through their huge device businesses, which could be used to quickly train assistants on user behaviors and language.”
Sources tell the Journal that “ Amazon executives are eyeing a land rush they have created, with new or planned devices using similar virtual assistants from Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. All four rivals have access to different, deeper pools of data through their huge device businesses, which could be used to quickly train assistants on user behaviors and language.”
- KC's View:
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Amazon, on the other hand, only has “user data primarily from its retail website,” the story says.
Only.
No small thing.
Which explains the Amazon-Microsoft tie-up that we reported on yesterday.
And, it illustrates that even Amazon, seen by so many people as an ultimate threat, also sees its own shortcomings, and is trying to address them.
Good lesson.
