Amazon Reportedly Designing Its Own AI Chips

Amazon is going to create its own artificial intelligence chips for future Echo devices that will be powerful enough to handle simple questions. Questions like “What time is it?”. That would add speech recognition directly to Alexa-powered devices and allow the voice assistant to respond more quickly. Amazon Reportedly Designing Its Own AI Chips.

In the chip-making game, Amazon now joins Google. Google heavily invested in making its own powerful cloud AI chips to get Google Assistant in anything it possibly can get into. Amazon’s goal is for the hardware to be built into any device that features Alexa, including the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Plus.

Amazon Reportedly Designing Its Own AI Chips

The Information has reported that Amazon, which seeks to stay competitive in the smart home hardware market and in the realm of consumer-facing AI products, has nearly 450 people with chip expertise on staff.

Amazon acquired chip designer Annapurna Labs in 2015. The company is now producing A.I. chips that specifically suit Amazon’s own hardware needs. Currently, Amazon is also in the process of hiring chip engineers for Amazon Web Services, which shows that the company may be introducing its own proprietary chips for that department.

Amazon is not the first major company in competition to produce its own A.I. chips.

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