Welcome to the AI Ecosystem Report, featuring practitioner analyst and entrepreneur Toni Witt. This series is intended to deliver the timely intelligence about artificial intelligence (AI) you need to get up to speed for an upcoming client engagement or board meeting.
Highlights
Innovation (00:30)
Amazon is reconstructing its Alexa and Echo suite of products using artificial intelligence. This past September, Amazon announced that it was building a new generative AI (GenAI) model to power its entire Echo product ecosystem, aiming to improve the customer experience and expand on Alexa’s capabilities.
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2024, Amazon announced three other companies that have developed GenAI-based experiences on top of Alexa:
- Character.AI enables Alexa users with its plugin to have real-time conversations with different personas, such as fictional characters or historical figures.
- Splash released an Alexa plugin for users to create songs using their own voices.
- Volley developed a GenAI-powered 20 Questions game for Alexa, as it creates voice AI games.
These use cases demonstrate the versatility of voice AI platforms, as they’re being powered more and more by GenAI. Organizations in the voice assistant field have an abundance of opportunities to explore new possibilities as they begin reconstructing their offerings using cutting-edge generative models.
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Funding (03:40)
Robin AI recently raised $26 million in a series B funding round. This startup calls itself the legal copilot, as it’s a copilot for lawyers. It has a generative app platform that assists with the end-to-end process of creating, understanding, and reviewing legal contracts. Robin AI breaks its product down into three general use cases:
- It helps with drafting contracts using natural language processing.
- It reviews contracts and rephrases legal language, making it more understandable.
- With natural language, it lets users query the system by asking questions and it will highlight the text within the contract that refers to the query.
With customers reviewing contracts up to 85% faster, Robin AI has processed over 500,000 contracts. Its system was trained on actual legal clauses and fine-tuned to its specific industry. The use cases were launched in partnership with Anthropic, which provided support with the model training.
Solution of the Week (07:18)
Volkswagen announced that it’s embedding a ChatGPT-based voice assistant in its newest model of cars. This integration will start in the second quarter of 2024, first in the European markets then in the US market later.
The voice assistant will be active in the car for users to ask it to do basic functions, such as controlling the air conditioning, heating, radio, and more. It can also be used to have conversations about navigation and the area that you’re driving to.
Volkswagen said it’s taking the security of this integration very seriously and reported that it won’t collect any driving data.
