It’s 10 p.m. after a long day when you walk in the door and wonder aloud: “Did anyone feed the dog? Who fed the dog?” Panos Panay says he calls out to his family of six.
Turns out, nobody fed the dog, and so all the kids “scatter to their corners,” he told the Fortune Brainstorm AI audience in San Francisco on Monday.
The senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon says the new generative-AI-powered Alexa+, which runs on Echo hardware and can integrate with other devices like Amazon’s Ring security cameras, aims to ease the constant mental load in a household: remembering whether the pets ate, restaurants each family member pitched and saw vetoed, and regular grocery orders. The idea is to have “ambient” artificial intelligence around your house so that devices can assist in tasks, chores, and other household command center issues, said Panay.
The new Alexa+ is much more conversational, Panay said, and you no longer have to pronounce everything perfectly and discretely in order for it (or her, as Panay refers to the virtual assistant) to understand you.
“She’s the best DJ on the planet, in my opinion,” said Panay. “You have a personal shopper, you have a butler, you have a personal assistant, you have your home manager. Different people use Alexa for different things, and now she’s pretty much supercharged,” Panay said.
In addition to confirming that the dogs have not been fed, Panay said he used Alexa+ on Sunday night to head off another age-old debate: where the family should go for dinner. Both dinner decisions and pet chores are “classic fight[s] in my house,” Panay told the Brainstorm AI audience.
His youngest had previously suggested a few restaurants she wanted to visit for a quick bite and hadn’t yet been to, and Panay asked Alexa to remind them which ones his daughter suggested specifically. It was a sushi joint, and she enjoyed it, Panay said. That type of ambient listening and assistance with debate is the point, he said, and stops people needing to pull out their phones and start typing and scrolling for information.
From there, Panay said, Alexa can also take more concrete actions like making a reservation on dining platform OpenTable, ordering delivery for nights in, getting an Uber, and handling home issues such as telling you how many packages were delivered or the number of guests who stopped by. Panay said Amazon has more than 150 partners to aid in these integrations, although there is work ahead to get more partners on board, he added.
Thus far, Alexa+ has been rolled out to early-access users, and this week the product is available to those on a lengthy wait list, said Panay, and it’s been boosted by Amazon’s advertising. This week, the product is being released to anyone with an Echo device. The business monetization model involves “flywheels” from Amazon’s $2.4 trillion retail ecosystem, particularly around shopping for clothes, groceries, and other consumer items. “If you’re shopping on the grocery list and order groceries often enough, Alexa knows what you’re doing, and ultimately, can just order ahead of time for you moving forward,” he said.
Ultimately, Panay envisions users wanting “your assistant everywhere you go” because “the more it understands about you, the more informed it is, the better it can serve your needs.” And while Panay said there will be continued innovation from Amazon in this space, he refused to reveal any specific products. He said Amazon has a “lab full of ideas,” but most won’t make it out of that lab.
