Amazon unveils AI-powered Alexa

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Welcome back, Superhuman. Time to dust off that Amazon Echo lost somewhere in the back of your closet. Amazon just announced that even some of its older devices can now access a brand-new version of Alexa packed with agentic capabilities.

Today’s Insights

• Manager-level AI research, multimodal models, and GPT-4.5

• Amazon unveils AI-powered Alexa+

• Tutorial: How to create websites with AI

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• News, memes, what’s trending on socials, and more

TODAY IN AI

1. Microsoft drops first-ever multimodal Phi model: The new 5.6B parameter Phi-4 can seamlessly move between speech, vision, and text while being small enough to run locally on high-end computers. It’s especially good at interpreting and translating text, taking the top spot on Hugging Face’s speech recognition leaderboard. Meanwhile, developers can use an even smaller variant called Phi-4-mini to build AI-powered apps efficient enough to run in cars and on smartphones.

2. Good news and bad news about GPT 4.5: Sources told The Information that OpenAI’s next major model could be here by the end of the week. But there’s some speculation that it might only be available to $200/month Pro subscribers to start out. Plus, it looks like it might be more of an incremental improvement over its predecessor 4o, with Claude 3.7 Sonnet keeping its lead on certain benchmarks.

3. ElevenLabs’ new model turns your voice into text: The new speech-to-text model called Scribe claims to be the most accurate in the world, outperforming other options like OpenAI’s Whisper v3 across dozens of languages. Scribe supports 99 languages in total and the company claims that the model exceeds 95% accuracy across multiple languages.

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FROM THE FRONTIER

Amazon’s AI-powered Alexa is here

Amazon’s AI revamp might be coming a little late, but it looks like it was well worth the wait. Here’s everything you need to know about the new AI-powered Alexa+.

What can it do? For starters, your chats will now be much more life-like, letting you quickly jump between topics and requests or interrupt when needed. But the real game-changer is the platform’s new agentic abilities. It can use Ticketmaster to book tickets for you or help you make reservations with OpenTable — with more integrations coming soon.

What’s under the hood? It’s “model agnostic,” meaning it knows when to switch between Amazon’s proprietary LLMs and third-party models like Claude to tackle different tasks. Plus, new vision capabilities mean it can analyze images, videos, and even your camera feed. It’s also backward-compatible with many older Amazon Echo devices.

What took so long? The fact that Alexa interacts with lots of other Amazon-owned products — from Ring door cameras to Kindle e-readers — was both a blessing and a curse. Teaching Alexa how to communicate across so many different platforms reportedly took lots of extra development time. But now that Amazon has figured it out, that cross-functionality might give it a unique edge over the competition.

How can I use it? If you’re already an Amazon Prime subscriber, you’ll get full access at no extra cost. But if you don’t have Prime, you can pay $20/month for the premium AI features.

THE AI ACADEMY

How to create websites with AI in minutes

• Go to Wix AI’s website builder and hit the 'Create with AI' button.

• Now click on ‘Start Chat’ to start building your website.

• Chat with AI about the kind of website you need.

• Now click on ‘Generate Site’ and wait for a few minutes.

• Based on your site profile, the AI will create a brief for your new site including the structure and even its look and feel.

• Click on ‘Continue with Design’ and choose a domain name for your website.

• After your initial site is ready, you can keep playing with the themes, layouts or text, or regenerate all of it together in one click with AI.

• Once your AI-built website is ready, you can publish it right away or use Wix Editor to fine-tune every last detail yourself.

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

💬 Talking Encyclopedia: Perplexity’s faster, revamped voice mode lets you “engage in a long conversation about any topic,” including real-time news from the web.

🫶 Empathetic AI: Hume released a new model called Octave, which says it is the first to be trained on “emotional tokens” — helping it generate speech with better “rhythm, cadence, and emphasis.”

🪨 Rock Solid: IBM unveiled a new open-source reasoning model called Granite 3.2 that can quickly switch between standard thinking and chain of thought, following in the footsteps of Claude 3.7.

📘 Book Rec: Harvard Business School professor and entrepreneur Jeff Bussgang’s new book, The Experimentation Machine, explores how to find product-market fit in the age of AI, as well as how to use LLMs “to design, sequence, and rigorously run startup experiments.”

📈 Markets: Nvidia had a strong showing Wednesday, beating investors’ expectations across revenue and profits. It’s another sign that, even as models get more efficient, there’s still strong demand for the chips used to train and run them.

💰 Funding: Seattle-based Bridgetown Research, which builds AI agents for in-depth enterprise research, raised $19M in a Series A funding round led by Lightspeed and Accel. And former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s new startup, Thinking Machines Lab, could soon be valued at $9B as it looks to secure $1B in funding.

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

✅ DeepTutor: An AI-powered research assistant built for academic, corporate, and professional analysis — going far beyond basic text retrieval.

✅ Forage: An AI platform that filters out low-priority emails and lets you receive them as a clean, daily summary.

✅ Genesys Cloud CX*: A trusted leader in orchestrating AI-powered customer and employee experiences

✅ Basalt: Transform your idea into ready-to-deploy prompts to integrate AI into your product in seconds.

✅ Caramel: An AI-powered ad platform that lets agencies, businesses, and freelancers launch high-performing campaigns without technical expertise.

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PROMPT OF THE DAY

Weekly Workout Challenge

Prompt: You are an expert fitness coach. I am [mention the problem you’re facing in detail with context]. Generate a challenging yet engaging ‘Workout Challenge of the Week’ focused on [state fitness goal]. Ensure it’s suitable for someone with access to [mention available equipment or no equipment]. I want you to [mention how you want the output in detail with examples].

_{Source: Shushant Lakhyani / Medium}

SOCIAL SIGNALS

What’s trending on socials today

✈️ Test Flight: Entrepreneur Pieter Levels and fellow developers built a multiplayer flight simulator with code written almost entirely using Cursor and Grok 3. Try it out here.

🔍 Flow State: Coder Ronith Kandallu demoed a “dynamic prompt field” he built that uses AI to switch between different commands on the fly based on what you type in.

💼 Slack Speedrun: Builder Mckay Wrigley shows how to build a Slack clone with Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Cursor Agent in about an hour.

🛠️ Do It Yourself: Solopreneur Marc Lou shared a three-hour guide for how to create your own SaaS business entirely with AI.

✍️ Grok Prompts: Tool and Tea shares its top tips for prompting with Grok 3, including six sample prompts that you can adapt to your needs.

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Spring on the mind

Midjourney Prompt: kintsugi sculpture coming alive, style: maria sybilla merian painting --chaos 100 --ar 2:3 --quality 2 --stylize 750

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Zain & the Superhuman AI team