It’s taken Amazon a while, but the tech giant has finally jumped on the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot bandwagon.
The firm has just unveiled its version of ChatGPT called ‘Q’ – which may be a reference to the ingenious tech boffin in the James Bond films.
Q – designed for employees in fields such as IT, software, customer service and more – lets workers ask questions that are specific to their companies.
Among its skills are summarising meetings, explaining programming code and locating information from hundreds of company documents.
Q comes soon after Elon Musk announced his own ‘sarcastic’ AI bot called Grok that will be integrated within X (formerly known as Twitter).
Tech giant Amazon is finally joining the AI chatbot party with its own offering, called ‘Q’, which is geared towards businesses
In a blog post, Amazon said the new assistant is specifically for work and can be tailored to a customer’s business – much like ChatGPT Enterprise, the version of ChatGPT for workers.
Currently, Q is available only for users of Connect (Amazon’s service for contact centres) in parts of the US, but it will roll out to other services and countries soon.
Some of the companies already using Q are automotive giant BMW, IT firm Accenture and pharmaceutical company Gilead, as well as Amazon itself.
‘Q can help you get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, solve problems, generate content, and take actions using the data and expertise found in your company’s information repositories, code and enterprise systems,’ the firm says.
‘When you chat with Amazon Q, it provides immediate, relevant information and advice to help streamline tasks, speed decision-making, and help spark creativity and innovation at work.’
Q can be connected to a business’s data, information and systems, so it can source numerous answers that are relevant to the company – but these are secure and not publicly-available.
The name Q may be a reference to the ingenious tech expert in the James Bond film series, played here by Desmond Llewelyn
‘Your AI-powered expert’: Among its skills are summarising meetings, explaining programming code and locating information from hundreds of company documents
Employees can ask about things they would have before had to search for across different sources, such as Google Drive, Microsoft 365 and Dropbox – saving them from the tedious task of searching through multiple documents.
In this way, Q will save time and increase productivity for a business, although it is also able to perform the sort of jobs that the general public already turn to ChatGPT for.
Q can help with tasks like generating a blog post, summarising documents, drafting emails and creating meeting agendas.
Amazon said Q has been ‘built with security and privacy in mind’ and never uses content from its business customers ‘to train its underlying models’.
In other words, no sensitive company data is used to train Q and the tool only accesses company information through a secure Amazon service account.
It follows controversy surrounding ChatGPT’s creator OpenAI, which is being taken to court over claims it breached copyright rules by ‘ingesting’ books without permission.
Amazon is the latest tech firm to jump on the chatbot bandwagon after the huge success of ChatGPT, which was released a year ago.
Amazon’s Q comes just over a year since ChatGPT was released – and soon after revolutionised the way we get information online. Unlike Amazon, Google was so panicked by ChatGPT it rush-released its own chatbot, Bard, in March
Q comes soon after Elon Musk announced his own ‘sarcastic’ AI bot called Grok (pictured) to be integrated within X (formerly known as Twitter)
Elon Musk (pictured here in the UK on November 2) said Grok is currently only available to ‘a select group’ before being rolled out more widely
Earlier in the month Elon Musk revealed Grok for X, which offers ‘spicy’ responses and a little humour, as an alternative to the formal language used by others.
Grok will be built within X, but only for users who are subscribed to X Premium+, the top tier of X’s paid subscription option, which costs a hefty £16 per month
Meanwhile, Google rush-released its offering, Bard, in March after fears that ChatGPT could replace Google Search as the best way to get information online.
Other chatbots include My AI built into social media app Snapchat, YouChat from US search engine You.com and Ernie Bot from Chinese company Baidu.
