Hey guys, how's it going? So, right now I'm in New York and today Amazon announced all kinds of new incredible hardware that we got to hear all about in the keynote announcements, followed by some real life demos with the new devices. We have a thinner Kindle Scribe in color, Blink's first 2K cameras, Ring with Retinal 4K, Fire TV powered by Alexa Plus, and sleeker smarter Echo devices with upgraded speakers, all built for ambient AI. After that, I actually got to sit down with Panos Panay, who is the head of devices and services at Amazon, to talk about these huge announcements. Panos, it is so nice to see you again.
Congratulations on all of the announcements today.
So, I've been using the Alexa Plus beta for the past couple months. Have you?
What do you think? It's unbelievable. It's game changing. And now we kind of have hardware to go along with it. So, can you kind of talk about what the process of that was like?
Yeah. I think you know you always want to build your products together, hardware software just as a design point. And in this case we built the silicon, the service sitting on top of it, the hardware coming out, the sensing that comes off the hardware. And so like every part of the product built in a way where if Alexa Plus can be brought to life in a better way, where you can bring AI to people's homes in a purposeful way, then that's what all the design points were. You kind of heard Daniel today talk about it.
And we talked about ambient AI today in the presentation. So what does that mean for like your everyday person?
So, at the end of the day, like just talk. Don't take out your phone. Don't hit a button. Don't open an app. Don't drive into some other just random place. Don't get distracted. With Alexa Plus in your home, or even Ring, like there's just cameras doing work in the background at all times. And when you need information, you get a Ring video notification. When you have a question for Alexa, just ask. There's times where you can leave a message. Like, you want to leave a message for your sister, you just say, 'Hey, leave a message for my sister. When she shows up, let her know.' Alexa can then be proactive, but it's just working for you in the background. So, there's like a simple powerful thing about that because you don't have to understand it all. And I think that's a little intimidating right now, like what am I getting into? What, you know, where do I go next? Am I doing it right? Like all that has to go away. It's just we want it to be simple for our customers, but most important, we want it to be useful. And I think once you get into Alexa Plus, since like you have, it just becomes useful immediately.
It does. It's just very conversational.
So, speaking of customers, you know, obviously like tech is my life. I love tech. I love AI.
Tech is your life. It is my life. It turns out it's a lot of my life too, right? It could be worse, though. We're doing okay.
I think it's all right. For some people who AI may be scary or it may be new to them, like how are you building trust with those customers?
A couple of things. Like we've been building trust for, I mean, with Alexa and Ring, I mean, for six or 10, depending on the time frame, 10 plus years. Just understanding what your customer needs is one thing. Providing it, making the product easier for them is another, but the real answer is customer has to be in control, period. Like there's no room for any other sentence. And so we do that. We enable the customer to have full control over their data, how much information they want to save or keep or delete or choose. You can have any chat you want, go delete it, and then it's, I mean, there's so many ways that the customer is in control. But at the same time, you know, if the customer just wants deeper understanding, more personalization, then the product just gets smarter for you.
Yeah. And so now it's got an understanding of who you are, Jenna, and what you love and what you watch and what you do. And then now it, that's like any assistant. It just gets more useful to you.
Well, Ring, the search party feature of being able to... Okay, I almost cried.
Did you almost cry? I mean, it's so cool, right? Like a tear, there's a few tears. I was like, wait, you can't cry. You didn't like the first time we, the first time we finished the video and it's a true, like it's like that's the truth. And that when that when the girl in the video says, 'Daisy,' like you're like...
No, I literally almost cried, right? You want a break? There's so much emotion when it comes to pets.
Yeah.
There's so much connection. And they're such a big part of our family. Millions of dogs are lost every year. Like to be able to empower people, their choice again to opt in and help you find a lost pet. Can you imagine where we are right now? How crazy fun and cool and just like special.
And I think the community around it too. It's like, you know, you have all of this technology. Obviously, so many people have Ring devices. Like is that something that you keep in mind when you're building devices? Like how do we make this more of a community thing? Like how do we have more of a social, a positive social impact?
For sure. So like you know you'll hear the Ring team and what how we believe we talk about Ring is our customers are neighbors. We talk about them as neighbors and this is about connecting communities. If you want a connected community, if you want to be connected to the community. But it's like that on almost all our devices. Like yeah we think about how many devices people have in the home. How do we connect them? How do we make them better?
That's so cool. I think that's awesome. And I just love that they are like consumer budget friendly but also like evolving, you know, you now have the 2K camera. So I guess like for the future of that, you know, is Blink going to kind of stay like that or is it going to try to evolve?
I think so. I mean, at the end of the day, it'll evolve. It'll get better. Search party will come to Blink as an example, like just so many more AI features. You'll see this kind of evolve. But I think to your, to the point you're making is we want that scale. We want everybody to have an opportunity, like regardless of your budget, just like Fire TV, like you want to be into that tech. We want to make AI useful to you. We have entry price points all the way up to what we call the signature products and you can just choose where you want to participate and Blink and Ring create a great scale for that.
Going back to the new Echo devices. So I saw that one of the, one of the things I love is Aura, and whenever I wake up in the morning I go make my coffee and my Echo Show says good morning Jenna and you know it's personalized for me like Alexa Plus is ready. So now being able to kind of see my sleep data and see, oh, I had a bad sleep. I need two cups of coffee today.
I think my favorite feature is when Aura has a recommendation, Alexa kind of shares like, hey, maybe you should go for an extra walk today or take a nap. And then it checks your schedule. So now you're into this funnel of like, I'm connected to Aura. Alexa has my calendar. It can look for a spot to work out. It's like one of my dream scenarios that people can just walk up to their device in the morning. Good morning, Jenna. You slept great last night. Good for you. Or you didn't sleep, you slept terrible, being able to have that conversation. Alexa, check my schedule. I want to go have a workout at 2:00 or I'm going to take a nap.
Uh, which is more in my camp. Uh, I love...
