Despite having the first-mover advantage, Amazon has failed to capitalize on the AI craze with its Alexa-powered smart speakers. Trying to change things, Amazon released a generative AI upgrade for Alexa and launched the Alexa+ chatbot last year. There’s a lot more happening behind the scenes – reuters Amazon is reportedly building an AI-centric phone.
We all remember what happened the last time the company tried to make a phone. To be fair, the Amazon Fire Phone was a decade ago.
Interestingly, it may be marketed as a kind of anti-smartphone, similar to the Lite Phone. For example, using AI, the phone can order from Amazon, play content from Prime Video and Prime Music, or order food from Grubhub. Since it’s not a traditional smartphone, it can help screen addicts deal with doom scrolling.
Internally, the phone is codenamed “Transformer”, a term referring to a key building block for modern LLMs. Although insiders say that the revamped Alexa will be the main feature of the phone, it may not be the “primary operating system” of the phone.
What does it mean? Well, this could mean that the phone will be based on Android – according to unconfirmed reports, Amazon will be switching its Fire tablets to Android (currently, they run a fork called Fire OS). There’s also precedent, with the Rabbit R1 and Human AI Pin both running on Android (of course, both AI-focused devices were infamous flops).
Amazon has integrated AI into its shopping experience
The Transformer phone is being developed by a new division inside Amazon called ZeroOne. It is led by Jay Allard, who previously worked on Microsoft’s Zune and Xbox.
Amazon has not discussed the project publicly or among the insiders we spoke to. reuters It warned that the project could be canceled if Amazon’s strategy changes or simply because the economics don’t work out. That said, there’s no word on how much the Transformer phone might cost, but rising electronics prices could make the path to profitability difficult.
