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Today I'm talking with Panos Panay, who's in charge of devices and services at Amazon. That's everything from Alexa, to Ring security cameras and Hero Wi-Fi routers, to the Project Kuiper satellite internet service that's meant to compete with Starlink. That's a big remit, but this conversation is almost entirely focused on Alexa.
Panos and I talked the day after he announced Alexa Plus, the new AI-powered version of Amazon's famous voice assistant. And I gotta tell you, this one gets pretty deep into the weeds of how it all works, and how Panos thinks about running his teams to make it happen. We actually talked about Alexa so much in this episode that I think it's important to take a break here so that any of you with an Alexa device can go mute the microphone. Go ahead. We'll be waiting. All right. You back?
So this is another one of those full circle Decoder episodes that I love so much. I actually talked to Panos' predecessor running devices and services, Dave Limp, here on Decoder in 2021. If you're the type to follow executive shuffles, you know that Dave left Amazon to go work for Blue Origin, which is Jeff Bezos' rocket company, in 2023. And Panos was hired as his replacement from Microsoft, where he was running Surface and Windows.
Having now talked to them both, it's safe to say that they have very different approaches to running teams and products. So I was excited to dig into what changes Panos had made in order to make the new Alexa Plus happen. Now, Panos and I have known each other for a long time.
which I think comes out in this conversation. If you're a tech fan, you know that he was the Microsoft executive who really brought the Windows hardware market back to life by introducing the Surface line of tablets and laptops. And he eventually ended up overseeing Windows itself.
That was a big job, but you'll hear Panos say that the idea of infusing Alexa with AI really drew him to Amazon. Like so many folks in tech, he sees AI as a platform shift that will change the way we use computers. And he's very aware that Amazon has a big advantage.
advantage with the enormous number of Alexa devices that are already being used all over the world. Making all those devices a bit smarter and more capable with AI sounds easy, but actually doing it is fairly hard. And we sat in the weeds of that execution for a while.
There's a lot of ideas here, and a lot of different parts of Amazon needed to work together in new ways to bring those ideas to life. That is pure decoder bait, and Panos was game to really get into it. He even got a little emotional at some points. One note before we start. Panos talks about experts a lot, and what he means in this context is the individual services that power different parts of the Alexa Plus experience, like music or photos. It's kind of like apps on a smartphone.
You'll see what I mean as we go through this conversation, but if it gets confusing, just think app and it'll click into place. Okay, Panos Panay, Head of Products and Services at Amazon. Here we go. Panos Panay, you told me that you don't care about your title, but technically it is SVP of Devices and Services at Amazon. Welcome back to Decoder. Good to see you, man. I'm excited. I love being here.
Yeah, I'm really excited to talk to you. I was sitting in the audience yesterday as you were announcing Alexa Plus. I have a lot of questions about how it works, the feature set, where you think it's going. But it occurred to me... I was sitting there watching you presented and then later as I was watching some of the demos of it working that to make it happen had to have required some big structure and culture rethinks inside of Amazon itself. And you joined about a year and a half ago.
Decoder is all about structure and culture rethink. So there's a lot here. There's a product to talk about. But then there's the path of getting to that product. Is that how you see it, that you had to reset some parts of Amazon to get to Alexa Plus? I don't think resetting Amazon, like Amazon's incredibly ambitious in so many ways. Always learning, changing. I mean, it's pretty powerful. The devices team a little bit. First off, we hadn't really had a...
Large-scale event, I don't think, as I understand it, obviously I wasn't there since pre-pandemic. The events under your predecessor, Dave Limp, they were entertaining in their way. It was... Here's a fire hose of stuff with Alexa in it, a microwave, a coffee maker. We would count. We'd be like, they announced 45 products.
And yesterday you announced one new product, Alexa Plus, and no new hardware. And that's a pretty big difference. What we did yesterday as a team, it was a little bit of a reset. Like the team was pumped to do it, excited. We were never going to announce hardware. Wasn't a goal.
We need reset Alexa for the world and bring Alexa Plus forward. That is a bit of a cultural shift. Like we're just going to focus on the service and what it's going to be. Great products are coming. We already have great products in market. We launched stuff at the holiday. And the team, they rallied.
The company rallied. It's pretty awesome. You know, having Andy there is fantastic. You can feel a vibe in that room for sure. I hope you did. You know, I mean, you made your snarky comment about the music when you got in there.
Man, we check every detail. I think I missed. I may have missed. I don't know. The chiptune rave music? It was pretty good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a funny one. I always wonder who sets the playlist because you can do a lot with music in the pre-show. Every single part of that show after the moment. the mic starts has been, you know, very, very well thought through. Yesterday's event was the highest risk event I've ever done. Bar none. Really? And that was, yeah.
Bar none. I watched you reintroduce laptops at Microsoft in competition with your partners. Doesn't compare. Really? Why so risky? Because when you're basically doing hardware, you have fallbacks. The demos aren't... They're not live, but you always can just go to the hardware. When you're reinventing or kind of re-architecting an entire service, there's no backup. Yeah. It was the product.
I think the only product video we had, like actual video, was the kids portion. Because, you know, honestly, you're not kids in the audience. So sharing a kids feature without some emotion is a waste of time. It's like, here's a kids feature. Please write about it.
So putting a little bit of emotion and storytelling in it, those were all real demos that all really happened. That was one of the principles of the event. It wasn't like, let's go make up a fake story and let's see what, you know, we'll just put, you know, film.
That was the one area where it was just a, you know, it was like a, it wasn't a vision piece. It was the product, but it was the only area that wasn't live. And so there was a, there was a lot of trepidation. Like it was not the, it was not this, it was the hardest.
kind of event we've put together with the risk profile. Let's talk about Alexa Plus for just one second and get a sense of it. And then I want to talk about how you made it happen. I think there's a part that seems very obvious to people. You see an LOM...
You see it interact with you. You're like, this thing is great at natural language input and output. Maybe it's going to lead us to AGI and maybe it's not whatever. But like the core piece of it, the computer can talk to you in a non-deterministic way.
Everyone saw that and said, OK, Siri should work like this. Alexa should work like this. Google Assistant should work like this. And then the actual implementation of it has taken everybody a really long time. Yeah. What's the gap there? It's not just an LLM.
It seems easy, you know, put a voice to the LLM, let the LLM talk or, you know, TTS, bring it out, bring out the voice, you know, or if it's speech to speech, it doesn't matter which tech. If you want the elements of connecting to thousands of, and you know, I'm speaking for Alexa.
You asked a broader question, but let me just talk about Alexa. You want the element of connecting to thousands of thousands of APIs, partners that have been connected to Alexa forever. You're trying to manage hundreds of millions of customers who already have the product.
you want to update as many of those devices as you possibly can meaning you don't want to leave a customer behind and you know there will be some devices that are eight nine years old that won't work but everything else most things will like relative to what's used in the market today
So you got to carry forward all that history because people still love Alexa. You know, we're still growing. We still have usage that's higher than you would expect. Can't leave those customers behind. Like that's the worst thing. We focus on not doing that. So there's that element. Sitting on top of an LLM, you're now going, okay, just talking is just not that interesting, although awesome. Yeah. Like having ambient conversation, I think it's a superpower moving forward for Alexa.
It's different today on Alexa. It's like point, shoot, ask the question, hope to get the answer. Yeah. You guys call it Alexa speak. With my team a year ago, we'd be in meetings, in product meetings, and we'd be talking. And people would say, you know, let me show you the new Alexa with a demo and they would Alexa speak to it. And it was like, nope, speak normal. Like go to natural conversation. Don't adjust your speech for Alexa.
Like that's exactly what you don't want if you want natural conversation. It's hard though. You know, you've been training people for, we've been training ourselves for 10 years. You know, calling a timer is, can you set a timer for eight minutes? Calling a timer on the new Alexa is, I'm making a ramen egg. Gotcha.
I'll set a timer for eight minutes, like where she just proactively comes back and sets it. I didn't demo that yesterday because I didn't want the timer headline, but it's really badass experience. You know, it's really cool. And so there's a level of like that transformation where you... I'm off topic. Let me go back. At the end of the day, the LLM needs to be able to now, you know, it's the base layer. Then you got the next layer, which is just a series of different models.
picking the right model to do the job. And then that model is basically picking the right expert. And so the LLM plays a role, especially in the natural side of it. But as it makes it through the stack, it narrows down for accuracy. It narrows down for speed. It then narrows down for holding memory and personalizing it. And now you just have a series of experts basically sitting on top. And one of them is conversational.
That's not just an LLM. That's a series of, and by the way, if you look at any one of these other products, they're not just LLMs. They're basically, they're mainly, I don't know, overstating it, understating it, but so not to be rude, but they're chatbots. Yeah. And they're pretty good. They're damn good. You know, and then when you start typing, you know, long form and rewriting and, you know, dropping in summaries, very powerful.
creating videos, creating photos, isolated but powerful. But the idea that these experts all sit on top of the stack and basically there's a runtime that orchestrates and says, okay, call these experts. These two experts have to work together. Got it. And then it operates. That's just not simple.
Yeah. You know, the first thing I was asked when I got there, hey, why don't you just change the brain with an LLM and everything will be fine. Yeah. I think I probably asked that question the first time when we first spoke. You might have. Yeah. I mean, it's the first question. Yeah.
And I'm like, well, which one? And it won't work. All you'll do is talk and it'll be super verbose and it'll sound like you're talking to the internet. It's just not that. It doesn't work. And then everything else breaks.
which is the hardest thing. I don't think anyone else is doing what we're doing. We've got thousands of APIs now that we're able to call. You're able to get these, if you will, experts or agents, whatever you want to call them. It's not a real word. It's just being able to talk to each other at the right time. The invocation is like...
There's something invoked. And now the LLM at the bottom is arbitrating like, oh, what's he trying to do? What's he trying to do? Got it. Route it to the right model. Route it to the right expert. Got it. This expert needs to talk to that expert and give you an example if you want it. There's nothing simple about it. It's why you haven't seen it. Yeah. It's why it doesn't exist outside of videos. So the biggest thing I needed.
was to not do a demo, but to use the product live. Meaning you can code a demo just to be a demo. Like, you know, it's code. Like for that moment, make it look like. type of quotes but the principle was very very like clear and this hasn't changed at amazon to be clear like the team's all in like we are going to show the product that's what you saw one of the questions i have
Just about that orchestration layer. We've seen other companies try to build it. Even when Microsoft launched Bing with ChatGPT several years ago, they were talking about orchestration at that time. Is that... something that's evolving in the same way in different places? Do you have a unique approach? Yeah, I think we do. Is that competitive? I think it is. I think it's hugely competitive. It's pretty easy to...
Invoke a single API off. I mean, not easy. I don't want to discount anything. But let's say the expert is a grounding expert. I'm going to ground a local info. We're in New York. I know everything about New York. I'm going to make sure this conversation stays within New York. Calling one API.
Make sure you're grounded. Is expert a term of art within Amazon? It's just my term. Okay. As a team, we talk this way. So, yeah, I don't want to overstate it. I think some people call them agents. Some people call them APIs. Some people call them... I don't know, grounding to a certain experience, maybe. Our challenge was, it's not enough. We already have that. I mean, it's deterministic today with Alexa, but we already have it.
And so, meaning you can call a single API at a time, but then you get frustrated because you're like, I needed more than that. Let me give you an example. It's a simple one. Let's call photos agent or photos expert or just photos app. I mean, app's a bad word because you're not opening an app. But let's just say the photos expert and the music expert are both very important to this next example. The other day, I'm leaving the house.
I have Alexa Plus, obviously. And I go, Alexa, do me a favor. Find all the photos of Mary's, start a slideshow, and put music behind it. Okay. I just did a search command. I did a photos expert command. they have to talk to each other he's looking for mary slideshow got it and then that expert has to call the music expert and basically say play the music all right it does a phenomenal job it does it in
under two seconds, and I get a slideshow. It's pretty cool. Music's playing. I'm about to leave the house. It automatically chose music in some playlist. And then I just said, you know, change the music to Intern without, you know, re-invoking Alexa, which you saw yesterday if you were watching. It's very small. I just said, put something on that Mary would like. And then it switched it. And perfect.
And I just walked out the door. Okay. That's an emotional moment. It's one of my favorite parts of the product. Like if you said, P what's one of the things I'm like, that's it. You're like, you're pulling emotion out of your, out of the things that matter most to you. Mary wakes up. she comes in the kitchen there's a slideshow playing and it's got music she texts me do you know Alexa's like
on right now. I don't know what's happening. And I'm like, well, do you like it? You know, she's like, it's fun. I'm not turning it off. I'm like, well, I left it. It was a message I left for you. Now, the next step of that is to, you know, Alexa, leave a message for Mary when you see her. And she will.
But these are all like, they're multi-turned conversations, but they're also and statements. So when you have these, basically these conjunctions coming together, you have the continuation of a statement, because I just want to talk in natural language, to invoke all of that in one place. I think it's incredible. It's what Alexa can do. I don't see that anywhere else. It's quite powerful.
So even in that example, and this is what I was saying at the top. It's a simple example, right? But it's complicated. It is super complicated. But you're like, a slideshow, what's the big deal, Pete? I'm like, well, be clear. Like on that screen, it's emotional. It's ambient. It was natural. Like, yeah, but it is somewhat.
It's somewhat simple in the way you talk about it. Well, right. The outcome is simple. This is a thing I want. This is what I want for customers at the end of the day. But I'm looking at, OK, to make that actually happen, my photos need to be in Amazon's photo service. Correct. I need to be.
in amazon's music service correct well no spotify would have worked there too but yes sure you need to have a music service but i would like it to be i would like it to be amazon yeah those divisions inside of amazon all need to talk to each other in a common framework that alexa can address yeah I happen to be responsible for photo service, so I got that. That's a blessing, yeah. But like, you know, I look at Amazon. I look at Amazon's structure. Again, a lot of decoder is like –
You can describe Amazon. Can you describe other companies the same way? Amazon specifically has a language that how it describes how it's organized. So famously, it's single-threaded owners, right? Like single-threaded leaders.
How did you, when you came in, obviously from a different management culture at Microsoft, say, okay, I need everybody to participate? Because that seems like the thing in particular that Amazon has not been great at. And to make Alexa work the way you want it to, Amazon has to be great at it. First off, all of Amazon's rallying around Alexa. It's crazy. It's so cool. It comes down to a few things. Actually, can I ask about even that? Is that instinctual?
Is that you got them to do it? Is it Andy Jassy sent an email? Yeah, I think Andy's been a huge part of it. I have a role. I mean, I came in with a vision that I think Alexa is the thing that we can anchor and change the world with.
Yeah. Is that what drew you? This is one of my other questions. Is that what drew you from Microsoft to Amazon? Of course. Alexa Plus? I don't know if it was Alexa Plus. I'm not going to say that. Yeah. It was the advent of where we can take AI. You can see the turning point. I was there. I was in the middle of it. is just awesome moments. What Amazon brings relative to just even what I'm responsible for and how they can all connect magically through AI. You saw Fire TV and Ring yesterday.
I fully believe like this transformation is happening and Amazon's the leader in ambient AI, period, end of story. And in the home. And like, if we can connect all these things, that was this. Now we're talking whatever a year and a half ago when I was talking to Andy about joining Amazon and he was just so ambitious about it. Like just, he's like, look, come in and do it. Let's do it.
That is the tipping point. There's a lot of nuance in that, but that was the tipping point. We can change the world. You can think the scale, the relative level of investment, the ambition, the patience that Amazon brings, we're happy to talk about. Yeah, the answer to the first question is, sure, I come in, lay down a vision, re-architect the team a little bit. Yeah. Get the explicit focus on first thing we got to do is get Alexa right. Once we do that, we'll bring the hardware together.
To get Alexa right, it takes music, photos, shopping, and these are photos, of course, under me, but across the company, you have music, video, shopping. We'll just use those three as huge tenants to the product.
And, you know, those leaders are exceptional. There's no, we're not going to work together. It's the opposite. You know, and at Amazon, we set goals. They are cross-company goals. And so the goals are set out, you know, from... amazon nova which is one of the anchoring points of the product to what music needs to be on the product sure you know the expert is kind of a joint
thing the music expert but ultimately like that music service has to be perfect and music team is killing it right now shopping you know all in how to make it great we didn't do a lot of shopping yesterday just because it would have been like a meme. I mean, of course, like, you know, oh yeah, it's going to be amazing. And then video, same. And there's other areas, but we align and we go. But it does start with a commitment from me, for sure.
You know, I'm in. I'm all in. I'm already re-architected. It's not going to be easy. It's going to take time. Andy's patience, I would say, the company's patience to get it right for the customer is extraordinary. Like, extraordinary.
I mean, Andy was pushing me like, okay, you know, don't, you know, he wants urgency, of course, like you would expect from an Andy Jassy, but he also wants the right thing for the customer. And I mean, when you talk about customer obsession, like let's get it right.
Let's do it right and get it right. And we didn't move slow, even though, you know, you asked what's taking so long. I don't, I don't see that. You know what I mean? From where I'm sitting, I know it feels late because there's been a lot of announcements, but I think we're, we're here at the right time. we have to take a short break we'll be back in just a minute
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Welcome back. I'm talking to Amazon's Panos Panay. Right before the break, he was telling you about transformations and goals he set up since he joined Amazon about a year and a half ago. And that perfectly set up the big decoder questions. You have a big team. You talked about re-architecting. I think this brings me to the decoder question. You oversee everything from Ring and Blink to the photo service to the satellite service, Project Hyper.
You took over October of 23, November of 23. You cut some folks. How have you restructured your group? We refocused on Alexa, like we really did. It was in a lot of different places. and so we just made it super clear i had an alexa platform team and alexa product team that's not a platform team i guess it's not the right way to say it but just an engineering going across and a product team vertically is the way i look at it and uh
you know, that AI stack going across. And so once you get that focus and that clear ownership, leadership, you quickly see speed change. That was the biggest, I think, shift. Also made some shifts as a team where... A lot of the core horizontal functions, if you think about the lowest level of the OS or the stack as a horizontal or hardware or supply chain, were kind of intermixed with product verticals.
So I've just, I've shifted that around too, just to get more product focus. Like one of the number one tenants is we're going to make great products. Like let's just start there. I heard a rumor that you're in your, one of your first meetings.
you said that there were not great aspirational products and that's what you needed to do. Is that true? I don't know exactly what was said, but at the end of the day, I immediately started pushing the team to have amazing pride in their products. Yeah. Like we have to, because that pride shows up for our customers.
And yeah, we want to push for it. That is a little bit of a, you know, it's just, let's be super clear. These products have to be great. We're not making trade-offs if they're not. One of the things about Alexa is... Again, in previous administration, we would see Alexa coffee makers and microwaves. And the idea was we would just push microphones and speakers out everywhere and you would build this ambient platform. Everything is sort of listening. Everything is sort of aware of you.
That was the big dream of ambient computing, that the computer would vanish into many different devices. You're laying out something a little bit different, right? That there's going to be a focal point. in a piece of hardware. Yesterday was a lot about screens. It was. There's a lot of multimodal interaction where you're talking and touching a screen at the same time. That's different, right? To say, okay, there's going to be a place where you interact.
with alexa yeah that implies you're going to cut down this giant ecosystem of ambient devices how are you seeing that roadmap i think you got to focus the roadmap i think you're it's there's no doubt what you need is products that people want in their home but also need. So I don't think that history is broken. Obviously, the more endpoints, the better.
But they've got to be the right ones, and they've got to be the ones that people want to use. At one point, I think I saw a smoke detector with an Alexa microphone in it. I was like, we're getting a little far afield here. Here's what I will say. The go for it is... Focus on making great products and the right ones. I don't think you're going to see thousands of products a year coming out. That's not the goal at all. What I want is some...
attention to detail, making sure the right products for the customers are there, the things that fit into your home, the things that fit on your eyes, things that fit in your ears, so you can take Alexa with you. And just narrow the experiences that are great that way. And I have to tell you, the focal point, yeah.
It is a screen on an Echo device in the home. Like that can run your home. You don't need it. Yeah. With Alexa Plus, you actually don't need it. It's just a better experience. Yeah. And so when I'm asked. Because there is a little bit of, there is a little, I mean, I'm treading a little bit here on some hallowed ground. Like this is, there's a little bit of, look, we're going to light up all your Echo devices.
But it's just going to be awesome if you have a screen. Yeah. And when somebody says, so do you recommend a screen? My answer is yeah. Do you have to have a screen? No. You're still going to have a great experience. Remember, you have a screen in your pocket. It's called a phone.
That phone has an incredible new Alexa Plus app on it. And so you have a screen. You don't need it to operate it. But let's say you start a conversation with your voice and you just want to remember what that conversation was.
You're going to go to your phone to just capture it or you can send something to your phone. We didn't do it in the demo. Did we demo it yesterday? I think we cut it just for time. But anything you're doing, you can send a phone because it's like longer form. I wanted my phone. We're also launching Alexa.com. So you're going to use it on your PC. So it'll be in.
the right places. But at the end of the day, if focal point is to control your home, which by the way, hundreds of millions of customers, that's really the focal point today. You put a screen there, it's emotional. It's informative. It's useful. And it'll make a difference. It'll make a difference. So you come in, you restructure. You obviously want to get more focused on the products.
All of that feels like we're trying to change the culture, right? The structure is really a proxy for culture in many ways. Yeah. That brings me to like the other big decoder question. Amazon has a famous decision-making culture, one-way doors, two-way doors. You can buy books about it.
You're writing press release before you write the product. You have a long history at Microsoft. You're obviously trying to change some of that culture. How are you making decisions there? What's your framework? Are you inheriting all the Amazon approaches or you bring your own riff to it? Yeah.
I often get accused for making the final decision only when I have to. It doesn't mean I'm not making decisions. When I was studying up to come to Amazon and kind of making that decision, that was a life decision for me. It was a big one. And I was so inspired talking to Jeff, talking to Andy, like just inspired. No doubt. I also love Microsoft. So, you know, I'm inspired where I was sitting. So there's just all these conflicts. Those are personal to me, you know, like, oh my gosh.
But when I started reading, let's go to decision-making, and then I just watched a few stories that Jeff had told, talked to Andy about it. It basically, from a leadership principle standpoint, and from some of the... Things you hear about, like on decision-making principles, like one-way, two-way doors. It's hard to explain this, but it's so aligned to the way I was running my team. That's how I'd operate. It was weird.
You know, you're just reading the LPs. And I'm like, I used to have a culture box. The LPs are leadership principles. Oh, sorry. Oh, yeah. Right. So leadership principles at Amazon, you should check them out. You can go to Amazon, find them. They're rad. I mean, they're inspiring. They're almost, sometimes they're just obvious. Not all, not all of them, you know. And they're hard to believe, like big bets. Is that real? I'm like, yeah.
It's pretty damn real. You know, it's pretty incredible. You know, leaders, they do. They dive deep. Yeah, they do. They get into everything. And I think those are real. But in the spirit of when I started reading them. And then the way I made decisions, Neelai, they were aligned. Yeah. I mean, I'm not, no BS. Like they were just, it was like, it felt like right. I had a culture box when I was running my team at Surface and Windows.
And that culture box, you know, had five cultural principles. They were basically five of the LPs. But that's how I ran it. It was so connected. And when I got to Amazon, it was almost, what a team. I found this team that was not only hungry, but unbelievably talented, massive, and, you know, capable. Knows how to ship. Knows how to invent. And it's just a little bit of direction. It's all, I mean, I don't...
My job's to give that direction. And so making sure I lay out the vision, making sure everyone knows where we're going, what are the highest priorities. But when it came to decision making, to answer your question is, I fully operate in the values of... all right, let's make this call today, but no. And I think one of the strongest points of a leader, without any doubt, and I learned this from one of my colleagues in the past, you know, who I worked for, he used to teach me. He'd go, hey, Pete.
When you've made a decision, the best leaders in the world are willing to be wrong. Now, you've got to be right a lot, but you're willing to be wrong. Like this is a very, very, it's like simple to say, but it's a powerful concept. What is willing to be wrong mean? It means you got to put your ego aside. You got to be vulnerable. Like, do you know how hard that is?
Like in front of a team of thousands of people, like just, yep, I was wrong. And what does being wrong mean? It's not like this dramatic, I'm wrong, I'm sorry. That's not it. Being wrong, it's not... necessarily the wrong statement it is the you got new information a week later then use the information and if it was a two-way door decision guess what make the right decision but if you're not a great leader
You don't change that decision because, you know, you're like, I already made the call, sorry, but you knew it wasn't right for the customer or for the business or whatever the reason. It's just a fail. And this was very early in my career. It's very similar to the two-way door, one-way door. Once you've made the hard call and you're past the point of return, that's it. You made the call and you have to make decisions sometimes.
Man, and those are hard. Like you lose sleep over it. Like when I made the decision to have the event. Yeah. We're doing it. And we're like, well, product's not 100% done. I go, doesn't matter. I'm at 90% usage. We're going. And everyone's like, you realize that, and that was a two-way door decision until I sent out the invites. And so we checked the information a day before we sent out the invites. Like, we're going.
The minute you send the invites, that's a one-way door decision. There's no pulling back. It didn't matter how sick I was. It doesn't matter who couldn't make it. None of it mattered. And then now we're lining it up.
You know, we had the venue booked and we're like, okay, that wasn't a one-way door decision. You can always cancel the venue. Not cool. But if you had to, you know, and you kind of go through it and then you go get to that point. Yep. That's it. There's no new, there's no new information that was going to change it.
Great leaders, they'll make those decisions, but they'll always be willing. They'll always be willing to check themselves. And not just check themselves, but be willing then when they have new information, if the right decision is in front of them. You got to change it. And I always live by it. And so when you come to this world of, when you say, you know, this culture, like, Nilay, the Amazon culture is incredible. You have no idea how empowering that is.
Hey, it's a two-way door decision. All right, let's make the call. If we're wrong, let's deal with it. Yeah. But then we move and we move. And I get accused a lot of, you know, like to make a call and like, do you have all the info? Probably not, but. Yeah, we got to try something. We're moving.
Yeah, it's been pretty fun that way. Yeah. Let's put this into practice. Okay. I want to talk about Alexa Plus in great detail now. I think I have a sense of how you got the team to get the product so you could have an event. The big announce, the last thing you announced was the pricing. Yeah. And you started with, it was big reveal. Well done. Well played. You said it's $20 a month. Credit to Andy. That's Andy. That wasn't me. And it's free with Prime. This is a big decision.
Right? Pricing is like maybe the most important decision. Yeah, I think the exact words were $19.99 per month, but... Free with Prime. Free with Prime. Prime itself costs $15 a month. You're pricing the service $5 more than Prime. Are you subsidizing Alexa Plus with Prime? I want customers...
to understand that the service is better with prime. Yeah. At the end of the day, if you have Amazon video, sorry, prime video, prime shopping, you know, Amazon prime, you fundamentally get the best music experience. You get photos. unlimited photos that just makes the alexa experience better you don't need to have it it's a great experience without it but it's just better yeah
And so we talked about it, like we want people on Prime. You know, if you're on all those services, it comes together and has a collection on your product. It just makes the personalization so much stronger. It makes the invocation of services so much easier. Was this an obvious decision? From day one, this is going to be part of Prime? No. How did you make that call?
Just, you know, a series of events. I think back to two-way door decisions, that definitely, you know, whether it was, I don't think it was the first decision. Like there were different ways to think about it. You know, it costs more to run the service. That's all there is to it. Like, you're going to invoke an LM. You have many models working. There's a lot of inference. That's true. Then you heard Andy talk about how much cost is coming down with Tranium 2, and you just see...
the efficiencies, if you will, that are coming through, those are plumbed through the plan. We have an incredible, you know, opportunity in front of us. And so it wasn't about how much you're spending, how much you're making, like it's about making a great product. And once we were like, like we want to make sure people have the best product possible that is the that is the anchor and so we're like all right it's got to be with prime that's the best way to get customers there
The other piece of that that I see— I think people want it to be more complicated because I've been asked this question a bunch of times. I generally haven't answered it. I'd be like, oh, you have a choice. You can pay $15 or $20. It's your choice. Just choose. But at the end, not to be a—I'm not trying to be pompous or whatever. Sure. I think if you're on Prime, you're going to love it. So, you know, I kind of inverse the equation.
The other piece of that I see, the other way to think about it that I was curious about, you mentioned this. Alexa has distribution, right? You have a huge installed base of devices. This is... I think the first at-scale non-phone AI product. Yeah, it might be. It might be. I have to think about it. I can't think of any others.
I'd have to think about it. There's Google Assistant, but they haven't launched the way that you've launched this product yet. Like, Gemini isn't doing all this stuff yet. No, they're not connected. I don't know. Right, there's HomePods. But, like, Siri doesn't do it yet. Yeah, hard to do. It's hard to do. I don't think the humane pin was keeping you up at night.
And now it's gone. Well, it's not gone, I think. It went in HP, right? No, they shut it down. Oh, they did? Yeah, so it's gone. They won't work anymore in a couple weeks. It's a real thing. We've been breaking news to you here on the show. Wow. It's huge. You're so informed.
Sadly, that's my only job is to be informed. Make no decision. Just know everything. I don't see it that way. I don't see that. But that is the scale, right? If it's not a phone, you need something else. There's been a lot of excitement about what the something else could be.
be because you have a new user interface paradigm with voice, with natural language. But you already have it, right? You have the installed base. And saying it's going to be with Prime means you're just going to deploy it to that installed base. Because I'm guessing people with Alexa And people with Prime has a pretty massive overlap. Yeah, there is.
So you're just going to launch it to that whole service. Is that going to be a flywheel? Do you think you can actually? Because the promise of Alexa 10 years ago was this will compete with your phone. I don't think that actually happened.
Do you think that this will help you compete with the phone? I think it's more of a compliment now than it's ever been. You need the phone. We send things to the phone. We want you on it as well. We want you on the Alexa app on your phone. It's an awesome experience.
we can play with it if you want after yeah but i think i think it's a compliment to the phone i think it does replace a lot of things like i'll tell you i'll tell this i say it to my team all the time look the our customers are going to find the easiest path to something they just will it's innate
It saves time. It's about speed. It's about efficiency. The only time that's not true is when you're getting more joy. And a lot of times joy comes from speed, you know, or happiness comes from being able to complete a task quicker. Let me go back to the point of Ambient. One of the core tenants when we started Alexa Plus and the vision for it was we have the largest install base in homes on the planet.
I think that's a pretty definitive statement. I think it's true. Probably have to check with the lawyers to say something like that. So maybe I'm wrong. So let me qualify it. We might have the largest install base on the planet. The way Alexa Plus is designed is it's meant to be ambient. It's meant to be a conversation. And it will replace tasks you do on your phone. It's going to happen.
And so does it replace the phone? Absolutely not. But does it replace certain things? I think I told you the story before. Let me tell you again. When I was building laptops 12 years ago, when I'd first started on Surface, people came to me and said, There were a few people that were like, you've lost the plot, P. You're going after this thing and the laptop is dead. Like, why? Because phones are replacing the laptop. And...
I mean, you're using a laptop 12 years later, and it's pretty damn important to you. Probably more important now than it was 12 years ago. So what had happened was jobs moved to the phone that were really important, shopping, social media. your photos, I don't know, pick communication. But what happened was the things that didn't move to the phone only got stronger on the PC over that time. And so they essentially became compliments to one another.
If you're going to sit down and write a long story, you're going to do it with a keyboard. You want to be snackable information, you're going to pick up your phone. And then one got better at one of them, and the other got better at the other, and incredibly so. Actually strengthened them both.
I see this very similar. I think as Alexa Plus comes into market, I think it's going to be better at a lot of things and it's going to move jobs to it. I believe that. I think there'll be more emotion to be pulled out of.
Something that's conversational, knows you well, is personal to you. You can have a conversation, knows your calendar, can get some stuff done in a simple way. You might not always do it on it. I don't know. It doesn't matter to me where you do it. I just want to give you the shot. And if it's the easiest way to do it, can I give you just a fun example? I was sitting on the couch last week with Costas, my son. He's 24. We were hanging out and we were talking about the Clippers.
And he had asked me a few questions and, you know, I'm a fan of the Clippers and growing up. And then, of course, you know, since Steve Bottom is like just, I just love the team. I asked, Coase, did the Clippers win last night? He goes, is it quite even playing? This is I think a week and a half ago. I remember the day. And now we have Alexa Plus in the house everywhere. And my son works on AI now. He's blown away by it. You know, he had to sign an NDA.
And then can't talk about what he sees. And I realized right at that moment, Eli, I was going to lose him because you know what happens? You pick up your phone, you open it. Now you look, you see your notifications. Okay. You know that feeling. And you're like, oh.
I'm going to check my notifications or I'm going to jump on TikTok or whatever it is that you love about your phone. He's going to go get the information, answer it, and I'm going to lose my kid to my phone, to his phone. And now all of a sudden we went from this moment hanging out to him on the phone. It happens all the time. And it blew my mind. He goes, I don't know. Alexa?
did the Clippers win last night? And Alex goes, the Clippers did win last night. And then his score and blah, blah, blah. Kawhi Leonard scored so many. And he's like, is Kawhi playing? Yeah. Kawhi has been back for several weeks. And he now is having a conversation. The three of us are having a conversation. The job moved. Yeah. He would have never done that. We have to take another short break here. We'll be back in a few.
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Just go to Indeed.com slash Vox Business right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash Vox Business. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring? Indeed is all you need. Welcome back. I'm talking with Amazon's Panos Panay. Right before the break, he was talking about hanging out with his son.
and how the Alexa devices in his house kept the conversation going. Instead of picking up his phone to get the answer to question and getting sucked into his notifications, which was pretty relatable, His son asked Alexa for information, Alexa provided it, and the conversation between the three of them kept going instead of getting derailed by the phone.
So this was the promise of original Alexa, right? There are celebrity ads, right? During the Super Bowl, people are just like hanging out with their Alexas. It was a great ad, by the way. It was a great ad. Oh my gosh, what a great ad. But it couldn't do it.
Right? I mean, a decade later, we have trained a generation of consumers to believe that these products are limited and that we should use them to play music and set timers. How are you going to teach everybody that it can do? Actually, more important question. Can it do it? It can do it. It can do it. It can do it. I think we're resetting the next 10 years right now.
Are LLMs durable enough as a technology to build all the things you want them to do? Not just the LLM. It's not just the LLM. I understand that it's not just the LLM, but it is the enabling technology that's making all this go. They're durable, but they're going to continue to evolve at a rapid pace.
And they have to. Yeah, they are. But you have to be smart about how you build on top of it. I mean, obviously, everyone's doing a great job. I mean, I'm sure. But yeah, I think the promise is there. I'm not going to understate it. I won't overstate it. I can't. I believe the promise is there. I'm here at Amazon because I believe it's going to change the world and help people engage AI. And it's going to be easier because your device is there and ready for you. Yeah.
And we're going to make beautiful devices. And so all this will come together in a way where there's a team that's going to connect all these experiences. You saw a little bit of Fire TV and Ring that all of a sudden these natural moments are going to happen and you're not going to have to guess.
You're not going to wonder. Right, if you can do it, because it's not deterministic. Right. You're not issuing these like Boolean commands. Correct. Exactly right. And so hopefully everyone understands that concept. since it's non-deterministic and now you're going to ask a question, even if Alexa doesn't do it, she's going to talk about what you're trying to solve and you're going to actually get to an answer. Yeah. As opposed to, I don't know.
One of the things that I think is really interesting about the product, you talked about the kid's demo where it was telling a story to a kid. I've had my kid talk to ChatGPT in that way. I think it's fascinating to see that interaction develop. Then there's simple stuff.
Yesterday I sat in one of the smart home demos and they turned the lights from blue and green to like a warm yellow. And I was like, that's a lot of data center to turn a light from one color to another, right? So you can see inside of the orchestration you're describing, there's the most expensive thing.
have this real-time creative story. Then there's turn the light off, which should be simpler and cheaper. And I'm assuming the orchestration is picking what model to use when. That's exactly right. And some will do on the edge too.
Like you don't have to do it all. If it's point and shoot, old command, pretty, you know, we'll do it in a simpler way. But then I ran into Mike Krieger from Anthropic who's at the event. And Anthropic is one of your models. And he said the most interesting thing to me that I heard yesterday. Okay. He said.
And sometimes when I talk to Alexa, I can tell what it's anthropic because I know our model so well. And he's like, no one else will be able to tell. But he was like, sometimes I talk to it and I say, oh, that's my boy, which was incredible.
Okay. Right. And that's like a product person knows their product and maybe they're seeing ghosts in the machine, but it was just incredible. How are you picking between Nova and Anthropic? How are you picking the costs of these different models that you have to invoke?
What are they better at? How are you making that determination? The orchestrator picks the model that's right for the job. The how, I won't get into the details, but there's some awesomeness here. One of the things that inspired most people is that we're using a multi-model approach.
which I think is a little bit novel. But at the end of the day, it depends on what the task is. It depends on what's being asked for. I think right now you're seeing 70% of the utterances running through Amazon Nova, 30% running through... Uh, anthropic something at that rate, it changes. It just depends on how you use the product and what you're using it for.
um it is also non-deterministic basically there's a model that's like what's the best model to pick and then you're looking for accuracy and speed under you know just first understanding then accuracy then speed and you target um then you move it You pick the right model and then you fire to the expert and there's a small model in the expert, if you will, sometimes. And then those all orchestrate together and that's how it works. Inside of that is the way that you talk to your partners.
Slightly different than all of that. Right. And so there is the, I think you just did an API driven one where you asked for an Uber and Uber's got a bunch of APIs. Yeah. Uber's been awesome. Right. And that is... Uber, OpenTable, Grubhub, like these things that you use every day, like they're just in-depth connected.
It's like opening an app on your phone. Yeah, we understand how computers work. Yeah, without asking for the app. You call an API, it delivers a result. You call another API, great, the Uber's booked. Then there's the more agentic stuff that you were showing off. It wasn't quite ready yet, but a lot of people have this idea.
I believe the example was we're going to book a refrigerator or dishwasher repair – a stove repairman. It was a melee stove. He was going to choose last minute depending on how the demos went. I think he did – Did you do a Mele dishwasher? I know it was Mele because I was like, oh, those are expensive to fix. That's what I knew in my head. By the way, that's what he said. That's pretty funny.
And then he went on to Thumbtack, which is a partner, so he had permission. But what it was doing was it was looking at the Thumbtack website and clicking around and reading that back to you. And even with permission, I think of that as –
why wouldn't you just get an API? Like, if you have the permission, why not do it deterministically? Yeah, I mean, then the partner just has to do the work. Right, so this is basically cutting down on the amount of work a partner is doing. Yeah, you don't want to do the work, no problem. There's just a couple of different ways to engage it.
From an SDK perspective, this is just basically permissions. Yeah. And we have to work on, you know, kind of authorization and payment at the end of that, which is the trickiest part. And so I'm not going to get into how, but that's the trickiest part. Yeah.
And so completing the task is the trick. Getting almost there is not that hard. Yeah. But completing it. And so that's where you need the partner to be like, yeah, sure, we want this traffic and we're going to go create the service and send it through. Great. If you don't. No problem. But the answer on why not do the API is just these relationships are different. Partners want to work in different ways. One of the things we are trying to do, and I'm really re-engaging.
Alexa is we want to open SDKs. Basically, we want to open the product up for developers to come in and do what they want. Yeah. Like come, you know, make it great. And if somebody asks to fix something in their house. We got it. We have a way to get you there. Well, so that implies a lot of things. Having tried to get a melee dishwasher fixed in my life, it is expensive. They have to actually be using that service to actually book their appointments and take payments.
That is not necessarily true. They might just be marketing there. There's a lot of things you have to know that you're depending on that ecosystem to provide you to make Alexa just book a repair service professional for you, right? Yeah.
So that's the part where every time I talk to anybody about agentic systems, I'm like, oh, this is where it falls down. Payment is the other one. And the thing I've been calling it is just the DoorDash problem, right? If you say, order me some food, and it goes and uses DoorDash for you. or grubhub or whatever you've commoditized those service providers and you started to crush their margins
And after a while, like you might not want to be – because they can't upsell you anymore. They can't sell you their subscription credits or whatever else they want to do. They can't put advertising in front of you because the robot is looking at their website, not a person.
And I don't know why they would participate in that unless you have actually solved this payment problem to make that valuable to them. I think the partnerships are unique for sure. I think it's quite different. Remember, you always go back to your phone. The information is there. It's in the app.
It's not like we're doing something on the side and doing it anonymously and, you know, you don't have the customer info, I think. That's one thing. Second thing is like when you have those challenging, like let's use a Thumbtack example. Let's stick there for a minute. If you don't have a Thumbtack account,
The first time you do it, it'll just pop a QR code and say, here, connect, authorize, go. And then for forever then, you're going to fix things and Thumbtack's going to push you through it. There's just some simple things that you can do that makes the customer journey simple. and get those connection points. And once you do that, which is everything, you understand this setup is everything.
removing that barrier to entry. To make Alexa Plus great, you've got to share your contacts. You're going to want to add your photos. You're going to want to connect your service providers. It's a one-time...
kind of low barrier to entry go, and then you're all in. And, you know, the partners, you know, we don't talk about the deals with the partners or anything like that, but there's benefit on both sides. But at the end of the day, it's the right thing for the customer. I think there's a lot of...
partners out there that believe in that same philosophy, like let's get our customer to the end game. If you run Food Delivery Service A, I won't name the names to keep them out of it, but if I run Food Delivery Service A, And I have a deal with you. And Food Delivery Service B shows up and signs a deal with you. And I just ask Alexa to order some food. Suddenly, Alexa is a –
control of a lot of revenue. Yeah, but you have preferences. Customers have preferences. They know what to say. But why would they have a preference over where the sandwich comes from? Like what intermediary brings you the sandwich? You can't speak for the customer. But I would say they just
have a choice there will be simple ways to make it clear to the customer what they want the other part of this which is equally complicated is that that's partnerships and that's agentic stuff and usually when i talk to people at agentic services it's to open
The ecosystem to say, OK, we can browse the web for you. Now we have access to everything. You are doing that in a much tighter way, right? You're saying this is how we're going to bring partners in. Why make that decision? Why not say we can just go browse the web and do whatever? Just think it's right. Yeah. It's their business. And so.
We're seeing a lot of participation. People are all, like, there's a lot of partners. Yeah. And they're excited from what I see. Not all, you know, I mean, I can't speak for all of them, so it's hard. I'm not trying to talk in absolutes. But you have this. moment where you're like, the promise of Alexa's here, Ambient's here forever. They've all made skills in the past or they've done something that, you know, they...
They didn't get invoked and it's hard because the customer had to point, shoot, as opposed to just speak natural language, know exactly what they were asking for. But at the end of the day, now you have like... a truth in just speak and something comes up and now partners like, well, if they're looking for something from me in, you know, but I think it's only, I think it's right to, to be partnering and not, you know, not, not doing it another way.
Yeah. The other big- Which I'm pumped about. We have a great biz dev team that just, that's what they do. Yeah. So that's asking Alexa to do something and it goes off and does something in the world, right? It schedules a repair person, it orders some food, it books a flight. Great.
Then there's the stuff in your home, which Alexa has historically been very good at, right? Turn the lights on and off, make a routine. I'm very intrigued by the idea of automating routine creation with natural language, right? Make a bedtime routine for me. That is as messy as it gets. That's not even partnerships. That's Matter and Z-Wave. We do it all before then. This one's different. We already have partners that work with Alexa. If you already work with Alexa, you get the magic. That's it.
It's awesome. You saw it yesterday. There was no new code written on the partner side. Really? Nothing. I have my Govi lights at home right now that I put on the house. I mean, I'm just talking to him to change the color. Yeah. That's it. I would have never opened the app to change the color on my lights.
It just seems like the promise of the smart home forever, and this is what you're describing, is that it will get more invisible. This is what's awesome, dude. Right, it's going to get more invisible. You have to understand, this is what's freaking awesome. You have no idea how badass my team is. You have no idea. Yeah. me so i have to tell you yeah like this team yeah this team i'm now i'm now talking eero ring blink fire tv that i mean this team including alexa kuiper
They're incredible, man. They're so damn capable. I've not seen invention like this. Now, how we get it to the customer, you know, we're fine a little bit of that, but I got to tell you, and this is a great example. Because this works with Alexa program and the thousands and thousands and thousands, dare I say hundreds of thousands, things that work with Alexa, that is one of the largest connectivity tissues on the planet. It's crazy.
And they've set it up so well that now when Alexa Plus shows up, your routines are by voice done. Like 100%, Eli. It's so damn cool. Like the other day, Mary was so frustrated with me. and i don't have smart home at my house in the seattle area but i use it in another area and she was so frustrated with me she's like the lights are on all the time you know that i just grabbed my app like alexa
Every night, just turn off the lights outside at 10 p.m. and don't turn them on again until 7 p.m. the next day. That was it. Yeah. Done. The promise of some of the smart home standards that have made this messier, like Matter or Thread, is that you will be able to control these devices device agnostic, right? Yep. We'll take advantage of those as well. For example, and this is...
Everyone talks about smart home only in the context of their own lived experiences. Well, how do you not? What are you going to do? What story are you going to tell? I've got plenty of customers. But my joke is that if it doesn't show up in Control Center on my wife's iPhone, it doesn't exist.
She's not going to open an app. She's going to swipe down, see that pane, and that's how we're doing it. So you've got to bridge into that. The promise of something like Matter is, OK, we're going to see it across all of these surfaces. It's all going to work together. Are you thinking that far ahead?
Right, because where does the logic of my smart home live? This is back to the team. It's like as big as it gets. 100%. Yeah. Team has a roadmap. Especially if you're talking about putting hardware with a screen centrally in your home. Okay, now you've got a little computer running your house. And everything should talk to that. And that's where the logic should live. In theory. But we also have the cloud to arbitrate. Like we have so many different methods in.
You can use Matter. You can use Bluetooth LE sometimes. You can use Zigbee, but you can also... The brain famously runs on Z-Wave. You can use Z-Wave. You can fundamentally use works with Alexa. Just plumb right in. And so... There's no limitation for us to connect these things because basically we can orchestrate to it. The team has thought through it from every way to Sunday, but they've also been working on it for 10 years. Yeah. It's phenomenal.
It's probably one of the things I'm most excited about because you basically democratize the smart home. 100%. Yes, it won't work unless you gave. someone a button on their phone today. But you know, we just talked about this. You know where the job's better? Just say what you want. Yeah. It's a much better job to be done. I tried to do it with the music demo yesterday. I'm not sure it landed.
this point of it which is like just plugged them in the speakers were there i'm going to move music to the speakers i'm going to do it nuanced I think one time I said, move. I want to move the music. I want to hear the music. I want you to bring the music here. I used different language, so it wasn't continuous. That was all real working.
Probably those little nuances get lost on the natural language as if I had a direct command. I didn't. It could have been any of those. Or play, which I try to stay away from. And so it's the same concept. Like you just think it and say it. Think it and say it. It's very powerful. And on Smart Home, it comes to life amazingly. And this is credit to an incredible team. Yeah. Yeah. They've thought it through. Do you think that we'll see...
more of an explosion of consumer smart like there's big investments people i think so i think i think this is the tipping point you gotta put a bunch of light switches in or buy all new light i think so tipping point because you don't have to be an expert yeah you just don't have to be an expert it doesn't there's no such thing Just plug it in. That's it. And then say something.
I want to believe you, but I've been burned so many times. I don't care if you believe me or not at this point. I'm just saying. When you get after it, man. I'm ready to get the products. I'm ready to try it. I'm not going to just say this crap. Like, you go get after it. Like, it's pretty fascinating because, you know.
This is what an LM is great at. And then the expert that we have to go rationalize. And so it doesn't have to be deterministic. And so it's pretty interesting. By the way, it has to learn as well. So if you go turn on that light. Which light? That one over there. Oh, you mean the one in the living room? Yeah, okay. Now, that's not a good example because you're up against a switch, which takes is just go touch the switch. But how fast the system learns...
That'll never happen. It'll never happen again. He'll be like, oh, I know what he needs. He's asking on this device, and I got it. I know I'm turning on the light. All right. We're running on time here. I've got a couple more for you. What's one thing you want Alexa Plus to do that it can't do today? You know, I've shown you everything, but I'll tell you, like, if I can touch back to my Mary example. Like, I want these moments to connect.
Not only the home, but the family. And it's got some pretty amazing attributes. The idea that I can leave the house and leave a message and walk out the door. And then when Anastasia shows up downstairs. She gets the message and it's a lovely like note from her dad with maybe a direction of what to do. The fact that it's this total natural language moment feels magical.
Alexa's being proactive on your command, not intrusive, but you were asking her to be. When you start seeing those things, that's the thing. That's the thing I want it to be because you're just going to connect deeper into people's lives in a way that makes it better. I think you know me well enough. Like I want you to use these products and tell me your life is better. Yeah. Like that's it. But there's not a specific thing where you're like, I need the next turn of capability here.
Look, I have a vision for where this thing goes. I can't take you there. Like we've already revealed everything and we're shipping, you know, we're going to preview in a month and it's like, I'm sure we tipped over a few carts yesterday and like, you know, like, and so you're.
Just got to be careful how far I take it. There's so much for the future, but I showed you a few of my favorites and that's what we did. We narrowed it down. There's thousands of things it does now. Yeah. Try to narrow it down to the ones that were both told the story, but I also most emotional to me because that matters, you know, when I'm presenting and.
And I think sharing. Yeah. And the biggest thing, you know, you want the team to have pride in the best stuff they've created. And those moments are pride moments for the team. Here's something I'm really curious about. I've asked basically everybody who has had something to do with Alexa about this for a decade. Amazon always calls Alexa she. This is a, for some reason, this robot has a gender and it's a she and it's always a she.
why is alexa gendered in this way you know there's eight voices yeah with alexa plus we didn't talk i don't think we talked about yesterday it's in the blog post that i that we wrote is um Not the blog post, the about Amazon post. But I'm told I'm a dork when I say blog. I run a blog. It just depends what you're using. Pick your voice. Yeah.
But the default. I use the default voice. I love the new voice. You can use the old voice. I love the new voice. It's the default. And then you can pick a male voice or another voice and you can call it what you want. Yeah. I'm just wondering. For a decade, we've gendered this robot pretty relentlessly. This voice, the one we're using, I called her she yesterday. I understood that. I have a couple of people ask me. I'm like, well, that's kind of how I was thinking about it. Yeah.
I don't think it's more complicated than that. Yeah, makes sense. Is it fair? I mean, is it a fair question? I don't even mean to. I understand it's like a loaded time in American history asking this question, but I actually don't even mean it in that context. I just mean it's a.
It's a robot. It doesn't actually have one of those. It's only what we assign to it. Yeah, I think, look, it is. But it is getting more personal. It's going to be more meaningful in your life. Yeah. For sure. Do you want people to think about it as a person in that way?
You don't want to go all the way there. But yeah, I think it's okay that you think you have, you know, another set of ears when you want them. Another, you know, another set of thinking if you need it. I think it's quite powerful. Yeah. All right, last question. This is rolling out soon, right, to some devices? Yeah. I think it's the screens, the Echo Show 15 and 21. Yeah.
When is it going to hit everybody? Actually, the 8, 10, 15, and 21. 8, 10, so the screens. Yeah. It's rolling out next month starting with those devices, and it'll be a gradual rollout, and then it'll roll out to all devices. If you want to be in first, you know, my push is I want people using screen devices for sure. We're rolling it out there first because it's a great experience.
You go get a device and you're on the list, you'll be first to get it. That's basically it. If you already have a 10, a 15, a 12, sorry, 15 or 21, and you subscribe, then we'll get it out to you as well. That's where we're starting. Yeah. Do you think you're going to drive? And it'll light up the whole house, by the way. Oh, the other Alexas. Yeah. So let's say you have five Echoes at home right now and you just go get a screen and it'll light up your whole house.
Do you think he'll drive a hardware cycle with people trying to buy screens to get Alexa? I hope so. I mean, I think they should. And not because I want to sell another device, but I want people to have that experience. I think it's a miss not to have it. It's a miss. Yeah. It's just a miss. And so, yeah, I want to drive a cycle in the spirit of not trying to be a sales, not my thing. But I will say, if you want the best experience, go get a screen device.
You know, we're pleased already. I didn't expect, you know, pleased seeing the reaction from yesterday. It's nice to see. But I think in a month, you know, people get in their hands. We'll start the preview. Most features will be done. Most. There'll be a few that are coming later for sure.
And then we'll, you know, we'll roll it out to everybody when it's the right time. Yeah. Last question. You've said you've got to. This is your third last question. I know. But that's how I do it. You're my. I love. This is why I'm good at this. It's tricky. Really, last question. You've laid out a vision for where you want to go. You've talked about the big opportunity here. I've asked you if you think LLMs are durable enough to pull all this off. You've said they are.
Do you see this as a platform shift the way that other people have talked about as platform shift? Do you think we're going to actually reconsider how we interact with computers at like the biggest level, the way that touchscreens did it? the way that, you know, mice and keyboards did it. Not to be too cliche, I think 10 years ago was a magnificent moment when Alexa, 10 years and a couple months, but what a moment, you know.
It really was. A reset. I think right now, 10 years later, I actually do think this is that next moment, but this one is, to your point, that promise. I think this is the shift. I think this is that time. I mean, it's going to take years. This is not like, don't worry, you're not going to miss out. Somebody's like, well, why are you so late? I'm like, late? Do you know we're just at the beginning?
And by the way, our roadmap's awesome. And I believe, I mean, this team, their invention and the company's patience for invention and its ability to make the big bet and stick with it, not only creates an incredible future opportunity. But with that opportunity and bet and invention, you also have like the moment right now is just starting. It's literally just starting, dude. It's just starting. Yeah. Like it's...
It's a great future. Like, it's fantastic. And I think the home transforms forever, you know, starting now. But it takes time. I would say patience is one of the strongest qualities of Amazon. I had once heard infamously that, you know, I'm a great leader. I don't know the quote, but, you know, our best overnight invention took seven years. You know, it takes time. But right now, we're here. Ten years later, here we are.
And it's the beginning of that next gen. I think it is a shift. Yeah. I think it is right this moment. All right. No better place to end it, Panos. Thank you so much for being on Decoder. Great to see you, Eli.
I'd like to thank Panos Panay for taking the time to join Decoder, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder at theverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We also have a TikTok. for as long as TikTok lasts. And now we're on Instagram as well. Check it out. It's at decoder pod. It's a lot of fun.
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