It’s 10 p.m. after a long day when you walk in the door and wonder aloud: “Did anyone feed the dog? Who fed the dog,” Panos Panay says he calls out to his family of six.
Turns out, nobody fed the dog and so all the kids “scatter to their corners,” he told Fortune’s Brainstorm AI audience in San Francisco on Monday.
The senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon says the new generative AI-powered Alexa+, which runs on Echo hardware and can integrate with other devices like Amazon’s Ring security cameras, aims to ease the constant mental load in a household: remembering whether the pets ate, restaurants each family member pitched and saw vetoed, and regular grocery orders. The idea is to have “ambient” artificial intelligence around your house so that devices can assist in tasks, chores, and other household command center issues, said Panay.
The new Alexa+ is much more conversational, Panay said, and you no longer have to pronounce everything perfectly and discretely in order for it (or her, as Panay refers to the virtual assistant) to understand you.
“She’s the best DJ on the planet, in my opinion,” said Panay. “You have a personal shopper, you have a butler, you have a personal assistant, you have your home manager. Different people use Alexa for different things, and now she’s pretty much supercharged,” Panay said.
