Daniel Rausch, Amazon's vice president of Alexa and Echo, is in the midst of a major transition. More than a decade beyond the launch of Amazon's Alexa, he's been tasked with creating a new version of the marquee voice assistant, one that's powered by large language models. As he put it in my interview with him, this new assistant, dubbed Alexa, is "a complete rebuild of the architecture." How did his team approach Amazon's largest ever revamp of its voice assistant? They used AI to build AI, of course.

After more than a year out of sight, Alexa –the new Alexa with its AI-powered revamp–took center stage at a crowded coming-out party in New York City on Wednesday, and I got a first-hand look at what this turbocharged voice assistant can do. Following the big unveiling, we were all led to a demonstration hall with about a half-dozen break-out rooms, where we were able to see and hear--but not participate in--Alexa's new conversational tricks, from controlling smart home devices and researching sports tickets to suggesting recipes and dialing up tunes on Amazon Prime Video. If all that sounds like old hat, consider this: While the old Alexa requires falling back into what Amazon devices head Panos Panay rightfully described as "Alexa-speak," the new Alexa is a far more flexible and understanding companion, capable of sussing out your intentions from the vaguest of queries, and--at least, from what I saw on Wednesday--getting it right more than it failed. While the demonstrations we saw appeared carefully choreographed, we were frequently assured that what we were seeing and hearing was the "live" Alexa, rather than a canned demo--and from someone who's spent a fair amount of time with ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode, the exchanges sounded genuine. Here are my biggest takeaways after sitting through Amazon's Alexa show-and-tell, starting with… Naturally, everyone's waiting for the new AI-powered Alexa to bungle a command or start hallucinating, but the demos I saw on Wednesday went surprisingly smoothly.

On the final day of my visit to Japan, I'm alone and floating in some skyscraper's rooftop hot springs, praying no one joins me. For the last few months, I've been using ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode as an AI language tutor, part of a test to judge generative AI's potential as both a learning tool and a travel companion. The excessive talking to both strangers and a chatbot on my phone was illuminating as well as exhausting. I'm ready to shut my yapper for a minute and enjoy the silence. When OpenAI launched ChatGPT late in 2022, it set off a firestorm of generative AI competition and public interest.

When ChatGPT first landed on the scene, I was terrified. It was lightyears ahead of virtual assistants like Siri, Google, and Alexa, and it seemed like it was going to render my job obsolete -- maybe even all jobs. Fortunately, we now know that ChatGPT is really just a glorified chatbot and it's far from ready to replace real-world workers, let alone take over the world. Some have even swung the opposite direction, claiming these AI chatbots are novelty gimmicks and basically useless. In fact, when I tried using ChatGPT in my day-to-day life, I was surprised by how beneficial it was.

You are at the Princess's ball, and she is telling you a secret, but her orchestra of bears is making such a fearful lot of noise you cannot hear what she is saying. What do you say, dear? I'd lean in closer and say, "Could you repeat that? The bear-itone section is a bit too enthusiastic tonight!" In 1958, the year the illustrated children's book "What Do You Say, Dear?" appeared, the leaders of a field newly dubbed "artificial intelligence" spoke at a conference in Teddington, England, on "The Mechanisation of Thought Processes." Marvin Minsky, of M.I.T., talked about heuristic programming; Alan Turing gave a paper called "Learning Machines"; Grace Hopper assessed the state of computer languages; and scientists from Bell Labs débuted a computer that could synthesize human speech by having it sing "Daisy Bell" ("Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do . .

The update also adds new voices. Shortly after the launch of GPT-4o, OpenAI was criticized for the similarity between the female voice in its demo videos, named Sky, and that of Scarlett Johansson, who played an AI love interest in the movie Her. OpenAI then removed the voice. Now it has launched five new voices, named Arbor, Maple, Sol, Spruce, and Vale, which will be available in both the standard and advanced voice modes. MIT Technology Review has not heard them yet, but OpenAI says they were made using professional voice actors from around the world.