Amazon's New AI-Powered Alexa Is Finally Here 🔥

Welcome to another edition of Horizon AI,

Arriving more than a year after it was first announced, the new Alexa is finally here, significantly upgraded for the generative AI age.

Let’s get started!

Read Time: 4.5 min

Here's what's new today in the Horizon AI

• Amazon announces AI-powered Alexa+

• ElevenLabs Introduces Scribe: A New Speech-to-Text Model

• AI Tutorial: Instantly swap people and objects in any video using AI

• AI Tools to check out

• The Latest in AI and Tech 💡

• AI Findings/Resources

AI News

AMAZON

Amazon announces AI-powered Alexa+

Amazon has officially launched Alexa+, a generative AI-powered version of its popular voice assistant. The new Alexa brings smarter interactions, enhanced capabilities, and an upgraded experience that aims to make managing your home and daily tasks even easier.

Details:

• Amazon says Alexa+ is powered by a “model-agnostic” system that always uses the “best” AI model for a given task. Among the models it can choose from are Nova, Amazon’s in-house generative AI model family, as well as Anthropic’s Claude.

• Alexa+ can make up stories, generate AI art, and create songs with Suno. It also has vision capabilities and can take pictures and analyze images.

• The new assistant handles complex tasks like ordering groceries, sending invites, making reservations, and planning trips. It also has "memory" for a more personalized experience, allowing you to ask it to remember details like your diet and movie preferences.

• Alexa+ is $19.99/month or free for Amazon Prime members.

With AI supercharging its old features and introducing new ones, the upgrade seems to have been worth the wait. In the crowded field of AI-powered digital assistants, Amazon is stepping up, especially as Apple faces challenges with its Siri upgrade.

Source

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ELEVENLABS

ElevenLabs Introduces Scribe: A New Speech-to-Text Model

ElevenLabs is launching Scribe, its first standalone speech-to-text model, claiming it is the world’s most accurate transcription model.

Details:

• Scribe supports 99 languages, with over 25 (including English, Spanish, and Japanese) achieving less than a 5% word error rate — English alone boasts a 97% accuracy rate.

• Benchmark tests show Scribe outperforms industry leaders like OpenAI’s Whisper Large V3 and Google Gemini 2.0 Flash in multilingual tasks.

• Scribe includes speaker diarization (identifying who is speaking), word-level timestamps, and auto-tagging for sound events like audience laughter.

• ElevenLabs is pricing Scribe at $0.40 per hour of transcribed audio, specifying that this version of the model only works with pre-recorded audio.

The company said it will soon release a low-latency, real-time version of the model that will be effective for meeting transcriptions and voice note-taking.

Source

AI Tutorial

Instantly swap people and objects in any video using AI

Pika Labs' new PikaSwaps lets users seamlessly swap objects and characters in real-world videos with entirely new elements. Here’s how:

1. Go to the Pika Labs platform and select PikaSwaps from the available AI tools.

2. Upload your video. (PikaSwaps currently processes up to the first 5 seconds of a video.)

3. Select the object to modify:

• Use automatic object selection by simply typing the name of the object you wish to modify.

• Alternatively, use the brush tool to manually select an area for modification. (You can adjust the brush size for better accuracy.)

4. Choose your modification method

• Text Prompt: Type a description of what you want to replace the object with.

• Reference Image: Upload an image that closely matches the new object for better AI accuracy.

5. Click Generate, and the AI will seamlessly replace the object in your video. If you're not satisfied, use the Reprompt or Retry options to fine-tune your results.

6. Download the video or share it on social media.

AI Tools to check out

🌟 Project Starlight: The first-ever diffusion model for video restoration—transform low-resolution and degraded video into HD quality.

🔍 Phind: A conversational search engine for developers that combines web results with generative AI to provide answers, code examples, and guides.

📰 DeepTutor: Paper reading assistant with DEEPER understanding.

📈 Caramel: Boost sales and profits on Facebook, Instagram, and Google with AI.

👉 Basalt: Integrate AI in your product in seconds.

AI Findings/Resources

📚 Google's 9 hour AI Prompt Engineering Course in 20 minutes

👨‍💻 Learn how to code a SaaS from 0 using AI

🤔 What is Gibberlink Mode, AI’s secret language?

🌐 Build anything with Claude 3.7, here’s how

🔮 Agentic AI will be the real banking disruptor

The latest in AI and Tech

Microsoft launches next-gen Phi AI models

Microsoft's latest small language models, Phi-4-multimodal and Phi-4-mini, launch today on Azure AI Foundry and Hugging Face. Phi-4-multimodal improves speech recognition, translation, summarization, audio understanding, and image analysis, while Phi-4-mini is designed for speed and efficiency.

Nvidia says AI chip sales strong despite DeepSeek fears

Nvidia reported another record-breaking quarter, with revenue reaching $39.3 billion—exceeding its own projections and Wall Street estimates.

IBM debuts new Granite 3.2 family of models

The new family includes its flagship text-only large language model, Granite 3.2 Instruct, available in 8B and 2B versions. It supports tasks like summarization, problem-solving, and code generation, with the ability to switch reasoning on or off to help optimize efficiency. IBM is also introducing a new vision model specifically optimized for document processing.

Inception introduces a new type of AI model

Inception Labs, a startup founded by Stanford professor Stefano Ermon, has introduced a novel AI model based on “diffusion” technology, calling it a diffusion-based large language model (DLM). According to the company, this model offers the capabilities of traditional LLMs but with significantly faster performance and lower computing costs.

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Gina 👩🏻‍💻