Meta and Snap Focus on Smart Eyewear
Meta Platforms extended its partnership with EssilorLuxottica to continue the development of next-generation eyewear into the next decade.
According to media reports, Amazon intends to use Anthropic’s Claude models instead of its own AI when it releases a new version of voice assistant Alexa in October. The company will use generative AI from Anthropic for its updated Remarkable Alexa voice assistant because its software takes six to seven seconds to acknowledge and respond to prompts.
Reuters stated that Amazon chose Claude due to its improved performance. The tech giant also wrapped up a $4 billion investment in Anthropic earlier this year which gave it a minority stake. The news outlet previously reported the tech giant may offer Alexa under two new tariffs, with the top tier possibly costing up to $10 per month on top of its charge for Amazon Prime.
Despite having an early mover advantage, Alexa has never generated a profit and has been eclipsed by new AI-powered chatbots. It will be the first major overhaul of the chatbot since it launched ten years ago during founder Jeff Bezos’ reign. Executives, including CEO Andrew Jassy, are taking a personal interest in rebooting Alexa. The company is also again looking at developing more Alexa-enabled devices to broaden its reach into additional rooms, or for new use cases.