So for those who don't know, Panos is in charge of Amazon devices like Kindle, Alexa, and the satellite service Leo. And prior to that, you spent 19 years at Microsoft in charge of devices like the Surface PC. So if anyone knows what's coming next, I would say you do. And you're going to answer that question for all of us today. You're going to let us all know.
It's a bit of an intimidating question.
Okay. But before we get to that, Amazon has arguably been doing what comes after the smartphone longer than anyone with Alexa. So let's just start with a little update on the OG Alexa. So about how many Alexa devices are out there in the world today?
Oh, wow. I mean, there's over half a billion connected Alexa endpoints right now as we sit here.
Half a billion. How many are using the newest version?
A couple hundred million are using Alexa Plus, a lot for shopping right now, and on devices in home actually seeing like this energy. And of course, it's formulated around AI and what's happening there and the conversational nature of the product. People talk to Alexa two to three times more now than they ever have. It's pretty cool because you're just watching that engagement. It's a natural flow, and now you're getting so much use out of it that that engagement just keeps going up, which has been fun to watch.
Once upon a time, people were very, very excited about Alexa, and then it turned out they used it mostly to set timers. So I'm curious, with Alexa Plus, what kinds of questions are they asking? What's different? What have you learned?
You know, there's a ton. Like the smart home controls are crazy. Like the way they're being used, routines are being set up, just natural conversation, if-this-then-that type of conversations that are happening right now. You see a lot of that, the routine use. You also see just natural conversation questions being answered at the dinner table, like how do I do something? How do I get something done? And because it's kind of limitless, there's no end to the answers. You can have that conversation through and through just like you would with any Gen AI, but because it knows you so well, we start to see this engagement that it understands your family. It understands what movies you've watched. It understands what you've been shopping for. So it kind of rounds out the conversation in ways that are relevant to each person. So we're seeing it. That's where the usage starts to spike quite a bit.
Is when they're just starting to have conversations with Alexa. Alexa, what do you think?
Well, it's changed. Like at my house, you know, there's no phones at the dinner table.
But Alexa kind of joins the dinner table now. Like that's a thing. Like the ambient intelligence that's there is huge. I don't know if this happens to any of you, but when I'm at the dinner table, we don't use phones, which I recommend. I mean, I'm really for it. I totally fail. And here's when I fail. Question gets asked at the dinner table. Nobody knows the answer. Nobody. So what do you do? Pull out your phone.
You give yourself like this social permission, even though there's a written rule or an unwritten rule not to look at your phone. But we've given ourselves that permission, and somebody takes out their phone. And then what happens when one person takes out their phone? What permission does that give you?
Everybody. Everybody's on their phone.
You get to take out your phone too.
And before you know it, I'm checking mail. I'm looking at my notifications, right? You know, my social media addictions are kicking in, getting as much information as I can while somebody answers. But here's what's changed. Here's what's changed. You don't have to do it. Question gets asked, just ask Alexa. Alexa engages, have a conversation. A lot of times the kids are yelling at Alexa like, 'No, you're wrong.' And then there's a debate at the table. She's not wrong, but they don't want her to be right. And so I think that the social dynamic has changed, which then changes the engagement. Look, like with anything right now in a product that you're making, and just for those of you who are founders or startups, it's hard to say you're inventing something new that people do. It's very hard to say that. Maybe it's easy to say, it's hard to do, because what people are doing are very similar to what they've been doing for the last 20, 30, 40, 50 years: learning, teaching, writing, reading. And you know, the basics are still the foundation. What the hardest thing to do is understand when you're inventing something new, how has it made people's lives easier.
If you have to change their behavior, you're already pushing a boulder up the hill.
You really are. And if you haven't made it easier, like if you're like, there's a whole new way, this is a whole new way to think. Like, I don't know. I mean, we've been thinking for a long time. And like, but fundamentally, like the truth is, if you made it easier versus, you know, take that one extra step and it's one extra bit of work for sure. You've all used products where you're like, this is so cool, you use it one or two times, but then eventually you're like, it's just easier to do it the way I used to do it. That basically means it's an average product. You picked up and you put it away. A great product holds you. It just holds you because you're like, oh my god, it just got easier. Like everything got easier.
I have a question buried in here, which I will get to. Well, I'm going to ask you now. I mean, that is a thick stack of cards. Jesus.
I have so many questions. Okay.
I'm a professional question asker.
So you mentioned what you guys are doing with Alexa at the dinner table, and you think that's what's happening across America. But I'm thinking a guy like you with a lab of devices, your home setup must be amazing. Tell us about your home setup. What kind of things are you doing with Ring and Alexa and other devices?
First, I think my home setup is amazing. My wife has a totally different opinion of things. I probably right now am beta testing, you know, I don't know, 20-something devices in the house.
20. Yeah. So therefore, you're just continuously, you know, was that a beta issue? Or was that a customer issue?
So every device I have in the house also has a device that's on a beta account. And the reason is I want to know what my customers are experiencing today. Customer, customer, customer, customer. And you all should be thinking that way.
Tell us about some of these beta devices.
And then you have maybe it's the same device with the new bits on it, and you're beta testing the bits, and you're just like, here's the new experience that is coming. Or maybe it's a whole new hardware device, which is likely the scenario in many cases. I will never, I cannot tell you what those are. But at each time you're always checking like 0.1 to 0.2. Why would we create a device that didn't make life easier for people? Like why replace it?
Or what's one thing that you do now as the person in charge of all these devices at Amazon that you didn't do, say, I don't know, when you were just building PCs?
You know, the continuous test I have, and I always believe this, like if you're not willing to use your own product, like whatever you're working on right now, if you're not willing to use it, go work on something else. Like in the past, I had this belief, we don't design for ourselves, we design for other people, which is true. You design for your customer, but it turns out you're the customer too. And if you don't find yourself like entrenched in using it every day, you immediately know. It's very likely your customer isn't going to do it either. So for me, what's changed quite a bit is like I use every single product. And there's a lot of them. So you have to think about the frame of kind of the bucket. You talked about it. There's Kindle. I find myself reading more intentionally. So I then am switching accessories every day while reading. I have the new tablet which we just released, the Amazon Alexa tablet. It's a really cool tablet. Found myself working on that and only that and fell in love with it. But you start going through the array. Ring cameras. I have over 27 Ring cameras set up around the house right now. Two different accounts, continuously monitoring but also asking it questions. I have, I think, 14 Echo devices in the house right now. Just...
Seven of each. You know, my core account, primary account, we're going to launch new devices coming up here pretty shortly. Won't talk about those, but those are rad and those are in my house. And so those are the extras. And so you find yourself touching base on everything you want to use.
The more I use things and the less I use others, it's like the clearest signal something's off. And like one of the things that's really critical when you're building products and you're thinking about what are you doing for the future, it's very simple. If you don't find yourself using it because it didn't make things easier for you, you have to check yourself. You have to check yourself. You have to be willing to judge yourself right at that moment. And I think that's really tough because, you know, you have teams that you love. Like for me, I have this incredible team that I get to work with every day. And you never want to go back and be like, I'm not sure it's working, even though the spec is right, even though the PR FAQ that we wrote, you know, the PR that we wrote that we said this is what we were going to build was right. What you end up finding is like, but it's not working. And I think those are probably the trickiest moments.
So Amazon just introduced another version of its wrist AI device, B.
So tell us about these, and I think you brought some.
It's not on. It's cool. Check it out. It's got this little pop of gold so it matches my bracelets, which I love because these are meaningful to me. I won't take them off, so it's got to match. So it works perfect. B just announced this morning,
Which is cool. So we have the B Frontier and the B Eclipse. These are rad devices,
And like in essence, these are devices you wear all day or you attach to your phone all day and they do ambient listening and you take them with you.
They listen to your whole day. It's pretty incredible. Like one of the big things, like talk about making life easier. Let's talk about how AI is useful because a lot of times AI can be gimmicky. A lot of times it can be incredibly useful, incredibly powerful. A lot of times it feels like you've taken a superpower pill of smarts. Like there's a lot of things it can do. It can help you code, develop. Like for me, writing apps again, like it does a lot, but a lot of times it's just in your way and it's an extra step and you just, you know, it's a lot of work. What B does is crazy. It's crazy. You just wear it all day. That's all you do, and it helps you stay present. At the end of the day, what I mean by that is at the end of the day, it reminds you of the conversations you had. It reminds you of to-dos that you may have had. It tells you that you have some action items that you committed to other people, puts dates against them, and reminds you to get after it. Like it's crazy. It's like you have this consistent assistant with you everywhere you go. But here's the trick. It's ambient. A lot of times, what you're doing right now, what we all do right now, is we have to remember what we're asking our tool to do for us. And this is really important to the future of smartphones.
You're always asking first. It's like point, shoot, return.
I think where we're headed is a world, and it starts in devices like this, these ambient devices, where it's ambient and it's working for you. And as it works for you in the background, you are able to stay more present. You're able to get more done. You're able to spend more time with people you want to. You're not afraid if you miss something. It's incredibly powerful. I think B Frontier is like the tipping point. And if you put one of these on, you wear it all day, wear it for a week, and then you look at the insights that it gives you. One other thing it does, which is like this one's tricky. It has this, I'm going to put like a filter of empathy of sorts. And like, your voice was cracking by the end of the day. You seem a little bit tired. And by the end of the week, it's like you feel a little bit more stressed this week than you did last week.
B is noticing these things.
And by the way, it judges me as a father, which is like the worst because I love my kids like more than anything on the planet. It judges me as a leader.
