Amazon’s new AI-powered Alexa

PLUS: ElevenLabs' speech-to-text model reaches new heights

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Alexa’s long-awaited AI revamp is here — and it may be Amazon’s biggest AI move yet.

With a massive intelligence upgrade and new agentic power set to land in the hands of over 100M Prime members, is this the ‘ChatGPT moment’ for voice assistants?

Amazon’s gen AI-powered Alexa+
ElevenLabs’s new speech-to-text AI
Personalize your AI coding assistants
Inception Labs’ ultra-fast diffusion model
4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

AMAZON

The Rundown: Amazon just unveiled Alexa+, its highly-anticipated next-generation digital assistant completely rebuilt with AI — promising more conversational interactions, personalization, and agentic capabilities for everyday tasks.

Alexa+ can connect and leverage multiple LLMs, including Amazon's Nova and Anthropic's Claude, choosing the best model for each task at hand.
The revamped assistant can perform complex agentic tasks like booking reservations, ordering groceries, purchasing concert tickets, and more.
Other features include document analysis, remembering user preferences, maintaining conversation context, and integration with hundreds of services.
It will cost $19.99 monthly but comes free with Amazon Prime membership, with early access rolling out in the U.S. next month.

Why it matters: Legacy voice assistants like Alexa and Siri have lagged massively behind the AI boom, but this release will finally put advanced voice agents in the homes of 100M+ Prime members — potentially triggering another ‘ChatGPT moment’ for consumers outside the tech bubble (assuming it goes better than Apple Intelligence).

TOGETHER WITH WORKOS

The Rundown: WorkOS Radar is a security solution that shields your AI platform from fake signups, throwaway emails, and brute force attempts — all powered by advanced device fingerprinting and real-time detection.

With WorkOS Radar, you can:

Rapidly detect and challenge unfamiliar and suspicious devices in real time
Stop free-tier abuse and fraudulent behavior with advanced detection
Customize threat responses to fit your app’s exact security needs

ELEVENLABS

The Rundown: ElevenLabs released Scribe, a new speech-to-text model that claims to be the most accurate in the world, outperforming industry leaders like Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash and OpenAI's Whisper v3 across dozens of languages.

Scribe supports 99 languages, with claimed accuracy rates exceeding 95% for over 25 languages, including English, Italian, and Spanish.
The model raises the bar in a variety of languages that traditionally lack speech recognition and transcription options, like Serbian, Cantonese, and Malayalam.
Its other features include multi-speaker labeling, word-level timestamps, and the ability to detect non-verbal audio markers like laughter or music.
Scribe is priced at $0.40 per hour of transcribed audio for pre-recorded audio, with a low-latency version for real-time applications coming soon.

Why it matters: With Scribe’s accuracy and focus on the unpredictability of real-world audio, people can expect flawless subtitles, searchable podcast archives, and more. It also opens up high-level transcriptions to a more global audience — particularly for low-resource languages that have previously been neglected by other models.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to add custom instructions to Cursor and Windsurf AI coding tools to personalize and enhance your AI coding development workflow.

Here’s your step-by-step guide:

Download Cursor or Windsurf on your device from their official websites.
To set up Windsurf rules, create a .windsurfrules file in your project root or choose between global rules or project rules via “Edit Rules” in Settings.
Similarly, to configure rules in Cursor, head over to its Settings and set up global AI rules or project-specific rules.

Pro tip: Global rules set universal preferences, while project rules define instructions for specific project requirements. You can also browse this GitHub repo for ready-to-use templates of Cursor rules.

PRESENTED BY INNOVATING WITH AI

The Rundown: Innovating with AI’s new program, AI Consultancy Project, equips AI enthusiasts with all the resources they need to capitalize on the booming AI consulting market — set to grow 8x to $54.7B by 2032.

Tools and framework to find clients and deliver top-notch services
A 6-month roadmap to build a 6-figure AI consulting business
Student landing their first AI client in as little as 3 days

INCEPTION LABS

Image source: Inception Labs / Artificial Analysis

The Rundown: Inception Labs just emerged from stealth with Mercury, a new ‘diffusion’ LLM that generates text up to 10x faster than traditional LLMs while still matching their quality — with speeds over 1000 tokens/sec on standard H100 chips.

LLMs generate text one token at a time, but Mercury’s diffusion approach generates entire blocks in parallel for increased speed, efficiency, and control.
Their first model, Mercury Coder, matches or beats the coding performance of models like GPT-4o Mini and Claude 3.5 Haiku at 5-10x the speed.
Inception was founded by Stanford professor Stefano Ermon, who researched how to apply diffusion (commonly used for image and video generation) to text.
Mercury models can serve as drop-in replacements for traditional models in areas like code generation, customer support, and enterprise automation.

Why it matters: By bringing "Sora-like" diffusion to text, Inception is going against the grain on fundamental assumptions about how AI should generate language. Its technique could potentially enable more powerful agents, better and more efficient reasoning, and AI experiences that feel truly instantaneous.

💼 UiPath - Enterprise Sales Executive, Public Sector
📈 Cresta - Analytics Engineer
🌍 Luma AI - Community Marketer
🔒 Curai - Privacy Lead

Hume AI released Octave, a text-to-speech LLM that understands emotional context, allowing creators to design custom voices with control over emotion and delivery.

Perplexity introduced a redesigned voice mode in its latest iOS update, featuring six different voice options, direct search result navigation, and more.

Poe launched Poe Apps, enabling users to create apps and visual UI interfaces using a combination of reasoning, multimodal, image, video, and audio models on the platform.

Vevo Therapeutics launched the Arc Virtual Cell Atlas featuring Tahoe-100M, an open-source dataset mapping 60,000 drug-cell interactions across 100M cells.

Exa launched Websets, a search product that deploys agents for better results, beating Google by over 20x and OpenAI Deep Research by 10x on complex queries.

IBM unveiled its new Granite 3.2 model family, featuring compact reasoning, vision-language, and specialized time series models for enterprise use.

Microsoft launched Phi-4 multimodal and Phi-4 mini SLMs, matching or exceeding the performance of models twice their size on certain tasks.

Join our next workshop today, Thursday, February 27th, at 1 PM EST and learn how to transform your creative concepts into professional videos with LTX Studio's Tom Factor, Director of Creative Strategy and AI, and Alon Yaar, VP of Product.

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