This week, we’ve got a host of Avowed tips to help you make the most of your sojourn to the Living Lands. We’ve also got some pointers for mastering Magik in Marvel Rivals, and for defeating Mortal Kombat 1's new pink-clad ninja boss, Floyd. (Get it?) Click on for these tips and more.
Amazon’s long-awaited update to its assistant is almost here. About 18 months after the company first previewed the “next-gen Alexa” built with generative AI, it unveiled Alexa+, and early access will be available starting in March. Alexa+ will exist alongside the older Alexa and will cost $20 a month, unless you have a Prime membership, which will make it free to use. The new assistant will come with all the modern upgrades that its contemporaries like the redesigned Siri or Gemini offer, like more conversational interaction, better contextual understanding and the ability to “summarize complex topics” and “make suggestions based on your interests.” But it does one thing differently, and it’s the way Amazon purports to integrate with third-party apps and the rest of the internet that could set it apart.
At the presentation, vice president of Alexa and Fire TV Daniel Rausch outlined three ways the new assistant can integrate with other services you use. Firstly, it already works with “tens of thousands” of integrations already available, with Uber, Sonos, Samsung and Xbox being a few of the many logos that were displayed when Rausch said this. Presumably, that means Amazon worked with these partners to get their apps to play nicely with Alexa+ through their APIs.
Secondly, for the large swath of the online world that doesn’t have apps or the resources to code an API just for Alexa+, the assistant should be able to scour the internet for their website and navigate it on your behalf. During the presentation, Rausch demonstrated how Alexa+ was able to go to the Thumbtack website to hire a professional to fix his oven. Instead of having to whip out a phone or laptop to click through menus himself, Rausch could just verbally tell Alexa+ what he needed and what times he was available, and the AI did the rest.
This example in particular struck me as very similar to Google’s restaurant-reservation system Duplex, which, since way back in 2018, could call businesses on your behalf to book a table. All you had to do was tell Google what date and times you were considering, how many people were in your party and it would make the call for you, even speaking in a human-sounding voice to the restaurant. The way Alexa+ would click around websites on your behalf seems like Duplex on steroids.
Finally, Alexa+ can work with the “AI agents” on other sites, so you can talk to just one assistant instead of dozens of chatbots. In the presentation, Rausch got Alexa+ to work with the AI music generator Suno to come up with a country-style song about bodega cats.
After the company’s presentation, I spoke with Rausch to get more clarity on how Alexa+ will work with the rest of the online world. For one, I wanted to know for sure if that third method would work with customer service chatbots from companies like Capital One, United Airlines and more. While Rausch said that he had no details to share on specific names or services, he did confirm that “the SDK is all about integrations like that,” saying it’s for people to use Alexa to connect with agents on their behalf to complete tasks.
Rausch is aware that any friction at all in the adoption and setup process can turn people away. To that end, upgrading to Alexa+ should not require any additional sign-ins or authentication. You should be able to have all your connected appliances, security cameras and home routines carry over without any effort.
“The reason that customers love Alexa is it takes away all the complexity,” Rausch said. People don’t need to remember the brand of the WeMo plug they bought, for example, to be able to tell Alexa to turn off a lamp. “We would never take that away,” he said. When you’re adding new services after upgrading to Alexa+, Rausch said you’ll either do so “in the ways that you do it today” or that it’ll get even easier, since “Alexa can walk you through those setups in many more cases.”
According to Rausch, instead of having to “dig around in the Alexa app, you just say ‘Alexa, I want to set up a streaming account with Hulu' or something.” You’ll be presented with a QR code on an Echo device with a screen to facilitate that, and the assistant should guide users along the way.
“We like to say Alexa is an expert, and now an expert on herself.”
Amazon isn't the only company that has made its assistant perform tech support for users. This approach is very similar to how Siri can teach you how to, say, shoot a video in Cinematic mode or create a Genmoji. Where better to get help about a product you’re using than the product itself? Why make me go to a different place for information?
“From a customer experience perspective, customers just want the thing done,” Rausch said. “They don’t have to be responsible or care about any of these things, right?” He believes people just want the plumber or a reservation booked, and don’t want to fuss around with websites and phone calls.
People do want their digital assistant to be helpful and easy to use, but isn’t it equally important that these AI services are accurate and reliable?
When I asked Rausch how Amazon worked around the tendency of generative AI to hallucinate and sometimes spread misinformation, he said “I actually think in the industry, there’s been a mistake of thinking a model is a product.” He also said “LLMs are at the foundation of the architecture, but they’re not the only thing answering the question.”
In other words, Alexa+ is using a combination of Amazon’s knowledge graphs, reliable sources on the internet and partnerships with authoritative outlets. “Other products will simply give you an answer out of the LLM. If you're asking for an authoritative answer, that's not actually sometimes the way to get one. and I think that's what you're highlighting,” he said.
Rausch added that Amazon has “taken great care” with Alexa. “Will it make mistakes? Every piece of software makes mistakes,” he said. “But we’re working hard to ground it in knowledge.”
I’ve yet to try out Alexa+ for myself, and everything we’ve seen so far has been in highly controlled demos, so it’s hard to tell what real world performance will be like. But if the new Alexa is truly able to work with third-party services in a way that’s seamless and effective, it would not only bring Amazon back into the consumer AI race, but could possibly give it an advantage over the likes of Google, Apple and OpenAI. Considering Amazon really brought the idea of a virtual assistant into homes around the world, this could also have an impact that goes beyond the tech-savvy users of today’s AI services.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/YW4GjzC
This week, Warner Bros. shuttered Monolith, the legendary studio responsible for games ranging from 2000's The Operative: No One Lives Forever to 2017's Middle-earth: Shadow of War. The closure means that the studio’s promising Wonder Woman game, first revealed in 2021, has been cancelled as well.
AMD's decision to start off with mid-range RDNA 4 GPUs now seems prescient. NVIDIA's high-end RTX 5090 and 5080 are already selling well beyond their absurdly high prices, if you can find any in stock at all. And while the RTX 5070 Ti impressed us, it's already selling for close to the 5080's $1,000 launch price. Now AMD's Radeon 9070 and 9070 XT, which are set to arrive on March 6, have the chance to swoop in and deliver some serious competition.
Based on early briefings from AMD, which include some impressive benchmarks (still untested by us), the RDNA 4 GPUs appear to be compelling 4K and 1,440p for discerning gamers who aren't ready to drop four figures on a video card. The Radeon 9070 starts at $549, but even more impressive, AMD managed to keep the 9070 XT at a very reasonable $599 launch price. Naturally, those prices will rise based on demand and the whims of card manufacturers, but they're still impressive compared to the RTX 5070 ($549 MSRP) and 5070 Ti ($749 MSRP).
On top of the usual raw performance upgrades, the major selling point for these new cards is AMD's Fidelity FX Super Resolution 4 (FSR4) upscaling technology. Unlike previous iterations, this time around it's powered by machine learning, similar to NVIDIA's DLSS. According to AMD, that allows for better image quality while upscaling from lower resolutions, as well as low latency and frame generation.
So what does that mean in action? AMD claims the 9070 XT can run Space Marine 2 at an average of 53fps in 4K, but with FSR 4 running that jumps to 182fps. That's similar to the leap in performance we've seen on NVIDIA's RTX 50-series GPUs, which can generate multiple frames. FSR 4 is supported on more than 30 titles at the moment, but for other games like Star Citizen and Forza Horizon 5, AMD claims its HYPR-RX driver-level upscaler can also improve performance by up to 3X.
While both the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT come with 16GB of VRAM (unlike the 12GB the RTX 5070 is stuck with), the latter card will likely do a better drop driving 4K 240Hz screens. The 9070 XT sports 64 RDNA 4 compute units, 64 hardware ray tracing accelerators and 128 hardware AI accelerators, while the 9070 includes 56 compute units and RT accelerators, as well as 112 AI units. The 9070 XT can also draw significantly more power — 304 watts instead of 220W — and has more than a 500Mhz boost clock lead. The standard 9070 will likely be better suited for players who game in 1,440p most of the time, but who may occasionally dabble in 4K.
Curiously, most of AMD's benchmarks compare the new cards to the $549 RX 7900 GRE, a slightly under-specced card originally meant for China. But the company did make a handful of comparisons to other cards: For one, it claims the RX 9070 XT is 51 percent faster than the Radeon 6900 XT on average across 30 games while playing in 4K with maximum graphics settings. It's also reportedly 26 percent faster than the RTX 3090 across those same 30 games. As for the RX 9070, AMD says it's 38 percent in 4K/max settings than the RX 6800 XT and 26 percent faster than the RTX 3080. Surely AMD could have compared these cards to the RTX 40 lineup and newer Radeons, but then those gains wouldn't be as high.
Beyond gaming, AMD says its new RDNA 4 media engine will be able to encode H.264 with better image quality, and it'll support up to 8K/80fps encoding and decoding. As for AI, the 9070 XT is 34 percent faster than the RX 7900 GRE while using Davinci Resolve's Magic Mask Tracking Tool, and it's 70 percent faster while using Procyon SD XL for generative AI.
If AMD can manage to keep the Radeon 9070 and 9070 XT in stock, and also hold prices close to their $549 and $599 launch figures, I wouldn't be surprised if some NVIDIA diehards jump ship. And if you're looking for something even cheaper, AMD says its RX 9060 cards will be coming in the second quarter.
