Amazon announced on Tuesday to launch 'Q,' a business chatbot powered by generative artificial intelligence.
The tech giant made the revelation during its annual conference for the AWS cloud computing service in Las Vegas, showcasing its move to compete with other companies that have introduced attention-grabbing chatbots.
The emergence of ChatGPT from San Francisco startup OpenAI a year ago generated widespread interest in generative AI tools capable of producing human-like text, such as emails, marketing content, and essays.
This development initially gave an edge to Microsoft, OpenAI's primary partner and financial supporter, which utilized the technology to create its own generative AI tool named Copilot. The competition spurred other tech giants like Google to launch their versions of advanced conversational AI systems.
These new-generation chatbots can engage in conversation, generate text on demand, and even create images and videos based on their knowledge gleaned from extensive databases of digital content.
Amazon's Q boasts capabilities such as content synthesis, streamlining communications, and assisting employees in tasks like blog post generation. The technology allows companies to integrate Q with their data and systems for a customized and business-relevant experience. Currently, Q is available for preview.
Despite Amazon's dominance as the leading cloud computing provider, it does not hold the same reputation for AI research leadership as Microsoft and Google. A recent Stanford University index, which assessed the transparency of the top 10 foundational AI models, including Amazon's Titan, ranked Amazon at the bottom
Stanford researchers said less transparency can make it harder for customers who want to use the technology to know if they can safely rely on it, among other problems.
In September, the company announced a substantial investment of up to Dollar 4 billion in Anthropic, an AI startup based in San Francisco, founded by former OpenAI staff. Amazon has also introduced new services, such as enhanced human-like conversations for its popular assistant Alexa and AI-generated summaries of product reviews for consumers.
(With inputs from AP)
