![]() “One of the things we think is really cool about this paradigm is kids aren’t just asking Alexa questions and getting the answers - Alexa is now asking kids questions,” says Venkataswamy. That is, it’s not just kids asking Alexa a question and receiving a response. Unlike more traditional conversations with Alexa, the AI experience works two ways. ![]() Plus, over the next few months, Alexa will also prompt kids on some occasions, asking if they want to hear something interesting about animals. For instance, a kid might ask “What does a lion’s roar sound like?” or “How fast can a cheetah run?” This would also allow kids to enter the more conversational Q&A experience. They can either utter a particular phrase that kicks off “Explore with Alexa,” like “Alexa, let’s explore animals” or “Alexa, tell me an animal fact.” But the more interesting way to use this feature is to have kids engage in organic conversations with Alexa where this topic could come up. To access the new experience, kids can trigger the AI-generated facts or trivia in one of two ways. “What our AI is doing is taking trusted content and then figuring out what’s fun, looking at what’s fun, turning them into a trivia question - so it is doing useful things for us at scale that we wouldn’t have been able to do without this tooling…but we feel really good about the safety guardrails that are in place right now in terms of content,” says Venkataswamy. To that end, Amazon is also using AI to help it review the materials it’s using for “Explore with Alexa.” However, because the AI can generate tens of thousands of potential responses, not every answer can be reviewed by a human before being added to the experience. In other words, kids aren’t using generative AI on the fly when conversing with Alexa, and the content is pre-reviewed and comes from a small dataset of just animal facts and sources. “The way that we’ve integrated an LLM here is we use it to generate content at scale offline, and then go through a review process that includes both humans, as well as AI, and then take that reviewed content and then put it into our experience,” he says. ![]() “We want to go slow and be intentional and be measured with how we’re introducing this new tech, as well as any new tech for kids, which is why we’re not just hooking the experience up to an LLM at runtime and kind of letting kids go at it,” explains Arjun Venkataswamy, senior product manager for Alexa Kids, in an interview with TechCrunch. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, the generative AI experience is not happening in real time on the device. In time, the team would like to expand the AI to include other areas of interest to kids, like space, music, video games and sports. ![]() Initially, the content will come from just two partners, the World Wildlife Fund and A-Z animals. To address these potential problems, Amazon has put guardrails into place around its use of gen AI for kids.įor starters, the Alexa Kids science team narrowed down the new experience, which leverages Alexa’s LLM (large language model) technology, to include only kid-friendly fun facts and trivia questions. That also comes with constraints, however, as generative AI can be led astray or “ hallucinate” answers, while kids could ask inappropriate questions. Though there are already some AI experiences that cater to younger users, like the AI chatbots from Character.ai and other companies, including Meta, Amazon is among the first to specifically look to generative AI to develop a conversational experience for kids under the age of 13. Amazon’s Echo devices will now allow kids to have interactive conversations with an AI-powered Alexa via a new feature called “Explore with Alexa.” First announced in September, the addition to the Amazon Kids+ content subscription allows children to have kid-friendly conversations with Alexa, powered by generative AI, but in a protected fashion designed to ensure the experience remains safe and appropriate. ![]()
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