Despite having first-mover advantage, Amazon has failed to capitalize on the AI craze with its Alexa-powered smart speakers. Trying to turn things around, Amazon released a generative AI upgrade for Alexa and launched the Alexa+ chatbot last year. There’s more happening behind the scenes – Reuters reports that Amazon is building an AI-focused phone.
We all remember what happened the last time the company tried to make a phone. To be fair, the Amazon Fire Phone was over a decade ago.
Interestingly, this may be marketed as a sort of anti-smartphone similar to the Light Phone. Using AI, the phone can order from Amazon, play content from Prime Video and Prime Music or order food from Grubhub, for example. Since it’s not a traditional smartphone, this could help screen addicts combat doom scrolling.
Internally, the phone is codenamed “Transformer”, which is the term for a key building block for modern LLMs. While the revamped Alexa will be a core feature of the phone, it may not be “the primary operating system” of the phone, say insiders.
What does that mean? Well, it might just mean that the phone will be based on Android – according to unconfirmed reports, Amazon will switch its Fire tablets over to Android proper (currently, they run a fork called Fire OS). There’s precedent too, the Rabbit R1 and the Humane AI Pin both ran Android (forebodingly, both AI-centric devices ended up being infamous flops).
Amazon has integrated AI into its shopping experience
The Transformer phone is being developed by a new division inside Amazon called ZeroOne. It’s headed by J Allard, who has previously worked on Microsoft’s Zune and Xbox.
Amazon has not discussed this project publicly and the insiders who spoke to Reuters warn that the project may be canceled if Amazon’s strategy changes or simply because the economics don’t work out. That said, there’s no word on how much the Transformer phone may cost, but the rising prices of electronics could make the path to profitability difficult.
