Amazon launches business-focused AI chatbot called Q at Las Vegas conference

A new chatbot has entered the artifical intelligence race, and Amazon is behind the wheel. Many multibillion-dollar companies like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft have been leaders in AI. These companies and others have released their own versions of AI chatbots. Q, the newest AI chatbot of the bunch, was announced by Amazon in Las Vegas at the AWS re:Invent conference on Tuesday. 

Q is a generative AI that has been trained on 17 years of Amazon Web Services (AWS) knowledge and experience, according to a press release from the company.

The purpose of Q is to serve businesses, so all tasks it can complete are focused on assisting employees in their jobs. Q has the ability to complete tasks like synthesizing content, streamlining day-to-day communications, generating blog posts and answering questions quickly and efficiently.

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"Generative AI has the potential to spur a technological shift that will reshape how people do everything from searching for information and exploring new ideas to writing and building applications," said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and artificial intelligence, per Amazon's press release. "AWS is helping customers harness generative AI with solutions at all three layers of the stack, including purpose-built infrastructure, tools, and applications."

Q is labeled as "your generative AI-powered assistant designed for work that can be tailored to your business," according to Amazon's website. Q has the ability to give businesses a more personalized experience by connecting the AI to their data and systems.

According to Amazon's press release, Q's ability to give a tailored experience to users while maintaining strong security and privacy features is one factor that differentiates Amazon's AI from other chatbots on the market.

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"Amazon Q builds on AWS’s history of taking complex, expensive technologies and making them accessible to customers of all sizes and technical abilities, with a data-first approach and enterprise-grade security and privacy built-in from the start," Sivasubramanian said in the press release. "By bringing generative AI to where our customers work — whether they are building on AWS, working with internal data and systems, or using a range of data and business applications — Amazon Q is a powerful addition to the application layer of our generative AI stack that opens up new possibilities for every organization."

Q is up against competitors like Copilot by Microsoft, Duet AI by Google and ChatGPT by OpenAI. Right now, Q is available for preview, but users will have to pay for the service once the free trial ends.

In addition to Q, another AI initiative by Amazon is improvements to voice assistant Alexa. This includes making it more conversational than ever. In an article from Sept. 20, 2023, written by Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Fire TV, he highlighted all the changes coming to Alexa.

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Some of these changes are giving the voice assistant a more conversational tone of voice and a more personalized experience for users through things like preferences you've previously shared and services you have engaged with in the past. The company also announced in September its collaboration with AI start-up Anthropic, with an up to $4 billion investment by Amazon.