Amazon gives Alexa an AI facelift as it launches new smart speakers
Dave Limp, senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon.com Inc., speaks during the Amazon Devices and Services event at the HQ2 campus in Arlington, Virginia, on Sept. 20, 2023.
Al Drago | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon introduced a “smarter and more conversational” version of its Alexa voice assistant that the company hopes will bolster its position in the tech industry’s artificial intelligence race.
The company hosts an annual devices bonanza, where it typically unveils a smattering of new hardware and software products. In his final keynote address at the event on Wednesday, Amazon’s devices chief Dave Limp showed off a demo of an updated Alexa that’s freshly equipped with features powered by generative AI.
Limp, a 13-year veteran of Amazon, plans to step down from his role later this year.
From an event space at its new second headquarters in northern Virginia, Amazon showed a montage in which Alexa users were seen asking an Echo smart speaker for information such as the “best dates to travel to Puerto Rico.” One man requested that Alexa tell him a story about balloons, before abruptly changing his mind and asking for a tale about Jell-O.
There were a few hiccups during Limp’s demo. At times, Alexa lagged in its response, and at a few points, Limp had to repeat his question to get an answer.
Amazon calls the new feature “Let’s chat,” and said it will be available as an “early preview” for existing Echo owners in the coming weeks.
The new Alexa will have a more humanlike voice and is able to hold more natural conversations without being prompted by a wake word. It will also learn about users with each new interaction.
Similar to ChatGPT or other generative AI applications, Alexa will be able to compose messages for users and send them on their behalf. As an example, Amazon showed an invitation that Alexa wrote to a friend, asking the person to come over for a football game.
Rohit Prasad, a senior vice president at Amazon and head scientist overseeing generative AI, gave another sports example.
“The Red Sox are my favorite team,” Prasad said. “Imagine if they won, then Alexa would respond in a joyful voice. If they lost, it will be empathetic to me.”
Amazon previewed ways it’s using AI to better operate smart homes. With upcoming Alexa updates, users will be able to make more conversational requests, like asking the voice assistant to make their lights “look spooky” or say “Alexa, there’s a mess in here,” prompting a robot vacuum to switch on and suck up crumbs.
Limp employed the phrase “AI hallucinations,” a term that describes mistakes made by AI models, to explain how Alexa would do better.
“It would be incredibly frustrating if it hallucinated and turned on the wrong light over and over again,” Limp said, adding that Amazon’s AI models are fine-tuned to be able to work with various smart home applications, so that when “you ask it to turn on the living room light, it’s able to execute that correctly.”
Amazon also debuted new hardware, including an updated Echo Show 8 smart speaker. The device uses computer vision to adjust its display based on where the user is standing in a room. If they’re farther away, it will show fewer items on screen, but as they move closer, it will show more detailed information. Amazon said the device costs $150 and will ship in October.
It also unveiled a $120 Fire TV sound bar that’s available starting Wednesday, and two new Fire TV Sticks that the company says are faster and feature upgraded processors.
Amazon showed a new feature coming to the Alexa App and Echo Hubs, called Map View, which is essentially a digital floor plan of a user’s home. The feature is designed to make it simpler for users to manage their smart home devices. It could also provide a wealth of valuable data for Amazon to understand how people organize their smart home. Amazon says it’s opt-in only, and users select which rooms they want to add to their floor plan. They’re able to delete the data at any time.
Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.
Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.
As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.
Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.
Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.
This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.
Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.
The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.
Technology
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.
Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.
Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.
The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.
Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.
The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.
On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.
Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.
Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.
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