YouSaid · the spoken record

Panos Panay

lines on the record: 117
first: 2025-03-03
most recent: 2025-03-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And now we have Alexa Plus in the house everywhere. And my son works on AI now. He's blown away by it. He had to sign an NDA. Can't talk about what he sees. And I realized right at that moment, Eli, I was going to lose him because you know what happens? You pick up your phone, you open it. Now you look, you see your notifications. You know that feeling. And you're like, oh, I'm going to check my notifications or I'm going to jump on TikTok or whatever it is that you love about your phone. He's going to go get the information, answer it. And I'm going to lose my kid to my phone, to his phone. And now all of a sudden we went from this moment hanging out To him on the phone, it happens all the time. It blew my mind. He goes, I don't know. Alexa?”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He had asked me a few questions, and I'm a fan of the Clippers and growing up. And then, of course, since Steve Bottom is like just, I just love the team. I asked Coastas of the Clippers win last night. He goes, Is it quite even I think a week and a half ago. I remember the day.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“See this very similar. I think as Alexa Plus comes into market, I think it's going to be better at a lot of things and it's going to move jobs to it. I believe that. I think there'll be more emotion to be pulled out of something that's conversational, knows you well is personal to you. You can have a conversation, knows your calendar, can get some stuff done in a simple way. You might not always do it on it. I don't know. It doesn't matter to me where you do it. I just want to give you the shot. And if it's the easiest way to do it, can I give you just a fun example? I was sitting on the couch last week with Kostas, my son. He's 24. We were hanging out and we were talking about the Clippers.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're using a laptop 12 years later, and it's pretty damn important to you. Probably more important now than it was 12 years ago. So what had happened was jobs moved to the phone that were really important shopping, social media, your photos, I don't know, pick communication. But what happened was the things that didn't move to the phone only got stronger on the PC over that time. And so they essentially became compliments to one another. If you're going to sit down and write a long story, you're going to do it with a keyboard. You want to be snackable information. You're going to pick up your phone. And then one got better at one of them and the other got better at the other and incredibly so. Actually strengthen them both.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The largest install base on the planet. The way Alexa Plus is designed is it's meant to be ambient. It's meant to be a conversation. And it will replace tasks you do on your phone. It's going to happen. And so does it replace the phone? Absolutely not, but does it replace? I told you the story before. Let me tell you again. When I was building laptops 12 years ago when I first started on surface, people came to me and said. Were a few people that were like, you've lost the plot P. You're going after this thing and the laptop is dead. Like, why? Because phones are replacing the laptop.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think it's a compliment to the phone. I think it does replace a lot of things. Like, I'll tell you this. I say it to my team all the time. Look, our customers are going to find the easiest path to something. They just will. It's innate. It saves time. It's about speed. It's about efficiency. The only time that's not true is when you're getting more joy. And a lot of times joy comes from speed or happiness comes from being able to complete a task quicker. And so let me go back to the point of ambient. Like we have one of the core tenets when we started Alexa Plus and the vision for it was we have the largest install base in homes on the planet. Think that's a pretty definitive statement. I think it's true, probably have to check with the lawyers to say something like that. So maybe I'm wrong. So let me qualify it. We might have.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's just a, it's more of a compliment now than it's ever been. You need the phone. We send things to the phone. We want you on it as well Want you on the Alexa app on your phone. It's an awesome experience. We can play with it if you want after.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you already have it, right? You have the installed base. And saying it's going to be with prime means you're just going to deploy it to that installed base because I'm guessing people with Alexa and people with prime has a pretty massive overlap.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that is the scale, right? You have this is if it's not a phone, you need something else. There's been a lot of excitement about what the something else could be because you have a new user interface paradigm with voice with natural language.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other piece of that I see, the other way to think about it that I was curious about you mentioned this Alexa has distribution, right? You have a huge installed base of devices. This is, I think, the first at-scale non-phone AI product.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think people want it to be more complicated because I've been asked this question a bunch of times. I generally haven't answered it. I'd be like, oh, you have a choice. You can pay 15 or 20. It's your choice. Just choose. But not to be a, I'm not trying to be pompous or whatever.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just a series of events, I think back to two eight or decisions that definitely, whether it was, I don't think it was the first decision. Like there were different ways to think about it, it cost more to run the service. That's all there is to it. You're going to invoke an LM, you have many models working. There's a lot of inference. That's true. Then you heard Andy talk about how much cost is coming down with Tranium 2, and you just see the efficiencies, if you will, that are coming through. Those are plumbed through the plan. We have an incredible opportunity in front of us. And so it wasn't about how much you're spending, how much you're making, like it's about making a great product. And once we were like, like, we want to make sure people have the best product possible. That is the anchor. And so we're like, all right, it's got to be with prime. That's the best way to get customers there.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want customers to understand that the service is better with Prime. The end of the day, if you have Amazon, prime shopping, Amazon Prime, you fundamentally get the best music experience. You get photos, unlimited photos. That just makes the Alexa experience better. You don't need to have it. It's a great experience without it, but it's just better And so we talked about it like we want people on Prime. If you're on all those services, it comes together and as a collection on your product, it just makes the personalization so much stronger. It makes the invocation of services so much easier.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put this into practice. Okay. I want to talk about. Alexa Plus in great detail now. I think I have a sense of how you got the team to get the product so you could have an event. Big announce the last thing you announced was the pricing And you started with it was Big Reveal. Well done. Well played. You said $20 a month. Credit.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make those decisions, but they'll always be willing. They'll always be willing to check themselves. And not just check themselves, but be willing then when they have new information, if the right decision is in front of them, you got to change it. And I always live by it. And so when you come to this world of when you say, you know, this culture, Neili, the Amazon culture is incredible. You have no idea how empowering that is. It's a two way to door decision. All right, let's make the call. If we're wrong, let's deal with it. But then we move and we move. And I get accused a lot of, you know, like to make a call and like, do you have all the info? Probably not.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Didn't matter how sick I was, you know, it doesn't matter who couldn't make it. None of it mattered. And then now we're lining it up. We had the venue booked. And we're like, okay, that wasn't a one-way door decision. You can always cancel the venue. Not cool. But if you had to, you know, and you kind of go through it and then you go get to that point, yep, that's it. There's no one new information that was going to change it. And so great leaders.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're doing it. And we're like, well, product's not 100% done. I go, doesn't matter. I'm at 90% usage. We're going. And everyone's like, you realize that, and that was a two-way door decision. Until I send out the invites. And so we check the information a day before we send out the invites. We're like, we're going. The minute you send the invites, that's a one-way door decision. There's no pull them back.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In front of a team of thousands of people, like, just yep, I was wrong. And what does being wrong mean? It's not like this dramatic I'm wrong, I'm sorry. That's not it. What being wrong, it's not necessarily the wrong statement. It is the, you got new information a week later, then use the information. And if it was a two-way door decision, guess what? Make the right decision. But if you're not a great leader, you don't change that decision because, you know, you're like, I already made the call sorry, but you knew it wasn't right for the customer or for the business or whatever the reason. It's just a fail. And this was very early in my career. It's very similar to the two-way door, one-way door. Once you've made the hard call and you're past the point of return, that's it. You made the call and you have to make decisions sometimes. Man, and those are hard. Like you lose sleep over it. Like when I made the decision to have the event.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so making sure I lay out the vision, making sure everyone knows where we're going, what are the highest priorities. But when it came to decision making, to answer your question is, I fully operate in the values of, all right, let's make this call today. But no, and I think one of the strongest points of a leader without any doubt, and I learned this from one of my colleagues in the past who I worked for, he used to teach me. He goes, hey, Pete, when you've made a decision The best leaders in the world are willing to be wrong. You got to be right a lot, but you're willing to be wrong. This is very, very, it's like simple to say, but it's a powerful concept. What is willing to be wrong mean? Means you got to put your ego aside You got to be vulnerable. Like, do you know how hard that is?”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's how I ran it. It was so connected. And when I got to Amazon, it was almost what a team. I found this team that was not only hungry, but unbelievably talented, massive and, you know, capable. Knows how to ship, knows how to invent. And it's just a little bit of direction. It's all, I mean, I don't, my job is to give that direction.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, sorry. Oh, yeah. Right. So leadership principles at Amazon. You should check them out. You can go to Amazon, find them. They're rad. I mean, they're inspiring. They're almost sometimes they're just obvious. Not all. Not all of them, you know, and they're hard to believe. Like big bets, is that real? I'm like, yeah, it's pretty damn real. You know, it's pretty incredible. You know, leaders, they do. They dive deep. Yeah. They do. They get into everything. And I think those are. Are real, but in the spirit of when I started reading them, and then the way I made decisions. Nili, they were I mean, I'm not, no BS. Like, they were just, it was like, it felt like right at a culture box when I was running my team at Surface and Windows. And that culture box had five cultural principles. They were basically five of the LPs.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is so aligned to the way I was running my team. That's how I'd operate. It was weird, you know, you're just reading the LPs and I'm like I used to have a culture box”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I often get accused from making the final decision only when I have to. It doesn't mean I'm not making decisions. I was studying up to come to Amazon and kind of making that decision. That was a life decision for me. It was a big one. And I was so inspired talking to Jeff, talking to Andy, like just inspired, no doubt. I also love Microsoft. So, you know, I'm inspired where I was sitting. So there's this all these conflicts. Those are personal to me. You know, like, oh my gosh. But when I started reading, let's go to decision making, and then I just watched a few stories that Jeff had told, talked to Andy about it. It basically from a leadership principle standpoint and from some of the things you hear about like on decision-making principles, like one-way, two-way doors, it's hard to explain this, but”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you come in, you restructure, you obviously want to get more focus on the products. All of that feels like we're trying to change the culture, right? The structure is really a proxy for a culture in many ways. That brings me to the other big decoder question Amazon has a famous decision making culture one way doors, two-way doors. You can buy books about it. You're writing press release before you write the product You have a long history at Microsoft. You're obviously trying to change some of that culture. How are you making decisions there? What's your framework? Are you inheriting all the Amazon approaches? Are you bringing your own riff to it?”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't need it to operate it, but if you, let's say you start a conversation with your voice and you just want to remember what that conversation was, you're going to go to your phone to just capture it or you want to, you can send something to your phone. We didn't do it in the did we demo it yesterday. I think we cut it just for time. But anything you're doing, you can send a phone because it's like longer form on one of my phone. We're also launching Alexa.com. So you're going to use it on your PC. So it'll be in the right places. But at the end of the day, if focal point is to control your home, which by the way, hundreds of millions of customers, that's really the focal point today. You put a screen there. It's emotional. It's informative. It's useful. And it'll make a difference. It'll make a difference.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so when I'm asked, because there is a little bit of, I mean, I'm treading a little bit here on some hallowed ground. Like this is, there's a little bit of, look, we're going to light up all your echo devices But it's just going to be awesome if you have a screen. And when somebody says, So, do you recommend a screen? My answer is yeah. You have to have a screen? No, you're still going to have a great experience. Remember, you have a screen in your pocket, it's called a phone. That phone has an incredible new Alexa Plus app on it. And so you have a screen”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's what I will say. Like, the go forward is focus on making great products and the right ones. I don't think you're going to see thousands of products a year coming out. That's not the goal at all. What I want is some attention to detail, making sure the right products for the customers are there, the things that fit into your home, the things that fit on your eyes, things that fit in your ears so you can take Alexa with you. And just narrow the experiences that are great that way. And I have to tell you, the focal point, yeah, it is a screen on an echo device in the home. Like that can run your home. You don't need it. Alexa Plus, you actually don't need it. It's just a better experience.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you got to focus the roadmap. I think there's no doubt. What you need is products that people want in their home, but also need. So I don't think that history is broken. Like, obviously, the more endpoints, the better. But they got to be the right ones and they got to be the ones that people want to use.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a lot of multimodal interaction where you're talking and touching a screen at the same time. That's different, right? To say, okay, there's going to be a place where you interact with Alexa that implies you're going to cut down this giant ecosystem of ambient devices. How are you seeing that roadmap?”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things about Alexa is. Again, in previous administration, we would see Alexa Coffee Makers and Microwaves. And the idea was we would just push microphones and speakers out everywhere and you would build the same platform. Everything is sort of listening. Everything is sort of aware of you. Was the big dream of ambient computing that the computer would vanish into many different devices? You're laying out something a little bit different, right? That there's going to be a focal point in a piece of hardware. Yesterday was a lot about screens. It was.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know exactly what was said, but at the end of the day, I immediately started pushing the team to have amazing pride in their products. We have to because that pride shows up for our customers. And yeah, we want to push for it. That is a little bit of a, you know, it's just let's be super clear. These products have to be great. We're not making trade-offs if they're not.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We refocused on Alexa, like we really did. It was in a lot of different places, and so we just made it super clear. I had an Alexa platform team and Alexa product team. It's not on a platform team. I guess it's not the right way to say it, but just an engineering going across and then a product team vertically is the way I look at it. And that AI stack going across. And so once you get that focus and that clear ownership leadership, you quickly see speed change. That was a biggest, I think. shift. Also made some shifts as a team where a lot of the core horizontal functions, if you think about the lowest level of the OS or the stack as a horizontal or hardware or supply chain, we're kind of intermixed with the product verticals. So I've shifted that around too just to get more product focus.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then video, same. And there's other areas, but we align and we go. But it does start with a commitment from me for sure. You know, I'm in. I'm all in. I'm going to re-architect it. It's not going to be easy. It's going to take time. Andy's patience, I would say, the company's patience to get it right for the customer is extraordinary. Like extraordinary. I mean, Andy was pushing me like, okay, don't he wants urgency, of course, like you would expect from an Andy Jassy, but he also wants the right thing for the customer. I mean, when you talk about customer obsession, like, let's get it right. Let's do it right, get it right. And we didn't move slow, even though, you know, you asked, what's taken so long? I don't see that. You know what I mean? From where I'm sitting. I know it feels like because there's been a lot of announcements. But I think we're here at the right time.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chopping, you know, all in, how to make it great. We didn't do a lot of shopping yesterday just because it would have been like a meme. I mean, of course. Like, you know, oh yeah, it's going to be amazing.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Once we do that, we'll bring the hardware together to get Alexa right, it takes music, photos, shopping, and these are, you know, photos, of course, under me, but you have across the company, you have, you know, music, video, shopping, which is use those three as huge tenants to the product And those leaders are exceptional. There's no, we're not going to work together. It's the opposite. You know, and at Amazon, we set goals. They are cross company goals. And so the goals are set out from Amazon Nova, which is one of the anchoring points of the product to what music needs to be on the product. Sure, the, you know, the expert is kind of a joint thing, the music expert, but ultimately that music service has to be perfect and music team's killing it right now.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I fully believe like this transformation is happening and Amazon's the leader in ambient AI period end of story and in the home. Like if we can connect all these things, now we're talking whatever a year and a half ago when I was talking to Andy about joining Amazon. And he was just so ambitious about it. Like just he's like, look, come in and do it. Let's do it. That is the tipping point. There's a lot of nuance in that, but that was the tipping point. Like let's go, like we can change the world. You can think the scale, the relative, you know, level of investment, the ambition, the patience that Amazon brings. I'm happy to talk about. But yeah, the answer to the first question is, sure, I come in, lay down a vision, re-architect the team a little bit. The explicit focus on first thing we got to do is get Alexa right.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alexa Plus. I don't know if it was Alexa Plus. I'm not going to say that Was the advent of where we can take AI? You can see the turning point. I was there. I was in the middle of it. It is just awesome moments. What Amazon brings relative to just even what I'm responsible for and how they can all connect magically through AI. You saw Fire TV in Ring yesterday”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think Andy's been a huge part of it. I have a role. I mean, I came in with a vision that I think Alexa is the thing that we can anchor and change the world with.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got that. That's a blessing. I look at Amazon. I look at Amazon's structure. Again, a lot of Decoder is like. Can describe Amazon. Can you describe other companies the same way? Amazon specifically has a language how it describes how it's organized. So famously, it's single threaded. Owners, right? Like single threaded lead How did you, when you came in, obviously from a different management culture at Microsoft, say, okay, I need everybody to participate. Because that seems like the thing in particular that Amazon has not been great at. And to make Alexa work the way you want it to, Amazon has to be great at.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, no, Spotify would have worked there too. But yes You need to have a music service, but I would like it to be, I would like it to be Amazon music.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Simple example, right? I mean, it is super complicated. But you're like a slideshow. What's the big deal, Pete? I'm like, well, I'll be clear. On that screen, it's emotional. It's ambient. It was natural, but it is somewhat simple in the way you talk about it.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm like, well, I left it. It was a message I left for you. Now, the next step of that is to leave a message for Mary when you see her. And she will. But these are all like they're multi-turned conversations, but they're also and statements. So when you have these basically these conjunctions coming together, the continuation of a statement, because I just want to talk in natural language, to invoke all of that in one place is, I don't, I think it's an incredible, it's what Alexa can do. I don't see that anywhere else. It's quite powerful.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Automatically chose music in some playlist. And then I just said, you know, change the music to intern without, you know, reinvoking Alexa, which you saw yesterday if you were watching. It's very small. I just said put something on that Mary. And then it switched And I'm perfect. And I just walked out the door Okay, that's an emotional moment. It's one of my favorite parts of the product. Like if you said P, what's one of the things? I'm like, that's it. You're pulling emotion out of the things that matter most to you. Mary wakes up. She comes in the kitchen. There's a slideshow playing. And it's got music. She texts me. Do you know Alexa's on right now? I don't know what's happening. And I'm like, well, do you like it? You know, she's like, it's fun. I'm not turning it off.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just say the photos expert and the music expert are both very important to this next example. The other day I'm leaving the house. I have Alex Plus, obviously. And I go, Alexa, do me a favor, find all the photos of Mary, start a slideshow, and put music behind it. Okay, I just did a search command. I did a photos expert command. They have to talk to each other. He's looking for Mary, slideshow. Got it. And then that expert has to call the music expert and basically say, play the music. All right. It does a phenomenal job. It does it in under two seconds. And I get a slideshow. It's pretty cool. Music's playing. I'm about to leave the house.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just my term As a team, we talk this way. So, yeah, I don't want to overstate it. I think some people call them agents. Some people call them APIs. Some people call them. I don't know, grounding to a certain experience, maybe. Our challenge was it's not enough. We already have that. I mean, it's deterministic today with Alexa, but we already have it. So, meaning you can call a single API at a time, but then you get frustrated because you're like, I needed more than that. Let me give you an example. It's a simple one. Let's call photos agent or photos expert or just photos app. I'm an app's a bad word because you're not opening an app, but.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it is. I think it's hugely competitive. It's pretty easy to invoke a single API off an, I mean, not easy to, I don't want to discount anything, but let's say the expert is a grounding expert and a ground-to-local info. We're in New York, I know everything about New York. I'm going to make sure this conversation stays within New York. Calling one API, make sure you're grounded.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The invocation is like there's something invoked, and now the LLM at the bottom is arbitrating, like, oh, what's he trying to, what's she trying to do? What's he trying to do? Got it, route it to the right model, route it to the right expert, got it. This expert needs to talk to that expert. Give you an example if you want it. There's nothing simple about it. It's why you haven't seen it. Yeah. It's why it doesn't exist. Outside of videos. So the biggest thing I needed was to not do a demo, but to use the product live, meaning you can code a demo just to be a demo. Like you, you know, it's code. Like for that moment. Yeah. Make it look like Of quotes, but the principle was very, very clear. And this hasn't changed at Amazon, to be clear. Like, the team's all in like, we are going to show the product. That's what you saw.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it's the first question. Like, well, which one? And it won't work. All you'll do is talk, and it'll be super verbose. And it'll sound like you're talking to the internet. It's just not that. It doesn't work. And then everything else breaks, which is the hardest thing. I don't think anyone else is doing what we're doing. We've got thousands of APIs now that we're able to call. You're able to get these, if you will, experts or agents, whatever you want to call them. It's not a real word, you know, just being able to talk to each other at the right time.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're pretty good. They're damn good. You know, and then when you start typing, you know, long form and rewriting and, you know, dropping in summaries, very powerful, creating videos, creating photos, isolated, but powerful. But the idea that these experts all sit on top of the stack, and basically there's a runtime that orchestrates and says, okay, call these experts. These two experts have to work together. Got it. And then it operates. That's just not simple. Know the first thing I was asked when I got there Hey, why don't you just change the brain with an LLM and everything will be fine?”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the LLM plays a role, especially in the natural side of it. But as it makes it through the stack, it narrows down for accuracy, it narrows down for speed, it then narrows down for holding memory and personalizing it. And now you just have a series of experts basically sitting on top. And one of them is conversational. That's not just an LLM. That's a series of, and by the way, if you look at any one of these other products, they're not just LLMs. They're basically, they're mainly, I don't know, overstating it, understating it, but so not to be rude, but they're chatbots.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT