Amazon is working on an AI smartphone
Despite its pioneering status, Amazon wasn’t able to capitalize on the AI hype with its Alexa-enabled smart speakers yet. To change that, the company published a generative AI upgrade for Alexa last year and released the Alexa+ Chatbot. Now Reuters reports that work is underway behind the scenes on an AI smartphone.
Amazon’s attempt to launch its own smartphone is nothing new. However, the Fire Phone is already over a decade old and never achieved a breakthrough.
Amazon has integrated AI into its shopping experience
Unsurprisingly, the AI smartphone can order things online, play content from Prime Video and Prime Music, or have food delivered via Grubhub.
Internally, the phone is codenamed “Transformer,” a term for an important component of modern LLMs. According to insiders, the revamped Alexa will be a central feature of the phone, but possibly not its “primary operating system”.
The smartphone is expected to run on Android – according to unconfirmed reports, Amazon will switch its Fire tablets to official Android and discontinue support for its own derivative, Fire OS. The Transformer smartphone is being developed by a new division called ZeroOne, headed by… J. Allard, who previously worked on Microsofts Zune and for the Xbox team.
Amazon has not yet publicly commented on this project, and insiders who spoke to Reuters warn that it could be canceled if the strategy changes or if it simply proves unprofitable. However, there is still no information on the price of the Transformer smartphone, but rising prices for electronic components could certainly impact its profitability.
