Right.

I think one of the things that mattered a lot to me about Amazon was that, uh, I don't think we used the words at the time but I think, uh, you know, Andy might have used it in a recent shareholder letter.

Uh, you know, aspiring to be the world's biggest startup.

Being a startup guy coming to a place where there was just as much focus on invention, really obsessing about a customer, like, in a, in a deep way.

Thinking about each and every number on a spreadsheet as a person that you ...

That's the person you're n- uniquely serving.

So I think the culture there, that's very, that's very startup like.

I was just curious, like, how do you think of that? The, just in terms of, like, actually learning from failure versus sort of sweeping it under the rug like most organizations do.

[laughs]

But I love, you know, the range of topics you can talk to her about 'cause she's just deeply intelligent.

You notice that Alexa Plus is just much more personalized.

Uh, she remembers the things you tell her to remember or learns about things.

Like, you know, I was talking to Alexa about planning my twins' graduation party.

I've got two more going off to college and, you know, she knew all about Ellie and Ezra already and had ideas for what we might pull together and helped us with the invite list and sort of, you know, she's always learning the next thing and next way that she can help you.

And then the last thing customers are always learning more and more about is just the range of things that Alexa can do now.

Like, you don't necessarily need new hardware if you bought one, like, couple years ago.

[laughs]

There are millions, I would say, uh, if we, if we sat down to count.

Uh, really, I think about it in two buckets.

I think, uh, there are the things that you might sort of classically say Alexa can do.

She can play songs for you, or she can do smart home commands in, you know, in the original Alexa.

Uh, but tho- they were arcane.

You had to speak a certain way.

How important is it for Alexa to be part of this process of getting groceries, making it frictionless, and, and doing that in a non-brick and mortar way?

the ways in which these systems have advanced from where they were? I

mean, even for our most passionate ongoing users, you know, we have to help these customers realize the potential of what you can do with this new technology.

You can imagine what my house looks like.

And I've got some very, you know, avid, but plenty critical customers in my own home that use Alexa all the time between my wife and my three kids.

or my parents at their place.

And it's for a habituated Alexa user that was using the original experience, you know, there's just as much to learn about the range of things you can do with the new experience and get into the habit of just speaking naturally.

You can speak exactly how we're speaking to each other right now.

I'm actually curious how this sort of like transformation of Alexa itself has already and will continue to impact the hardware.

So walk us through kind of the, the journey that you all have been on over there trying to sort of shoehorn this new technology into this existing products, and maybe some of the, the challenges that you encountered along the way.

Well, I'll tell you.

You know, we should definitely get, uh, some of the feedback.

We can cover as much as you like here, uh, on the show.

So if you rewind the tape, actually you were asking about this too, is we're starting to experiment, what can we imagine doing? If you go back to 2023 and the models that were available then, the state-of-the-art, very little instruction-following, reasoning, low ability to execute on these interfaces with other systems, we announced something called Let's Chat, which was sort of a mode of Alexa.

So think about, you know, flipping a switch on Alexa and turning on a chat interface so that you can do some basic question and answer and have a discussion about a topic, mostly about knowledge native to the model's training data, versus bringing something in at runtime the way that, you know, modern chatbots answer questions by going out on the internet.

I think what we mostly learned from that announcement and the, the customers that we rolled out to, is that we just had to increase our vision and do something more audacious, basically.

Is th- is Alexa part of that overall effort to create and serve more capable AI systems? Or is this sort of a consumer, uh, targeted sort of spinoff of those efforts?

It is, it is real.

That is the size of the task, for sure.

I think, um, I think you're, you're onto it for sure.

Uh, you know, large language models, the one thing I'd add just in terms of thinking through the technical architecture to what Panos said is that it's really just the, the latest generations of large language models that can even do the things that Alexa needs to be able to do.

Uh, so you're talking about our Nova models, right, which we, uh, announced within the last few months and starting to get into customers' hands.

That's super exciting, uh, you know, partnership that we have with Anthropic.

Like, you're-- you really need very state-of-the-art technology at the base of the architecture in those large language models, and in large part because of what you said.

So how does it know when the user is saying, "Turn the lights on," versus, like, something more esoteric? Like, is there something built within the technology that's kind of like a switcher that determines first your intent and then decides which part of the model to send it out to?