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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But it's really badass experience, you know, it's really cool. And so there's a level of that transformation where you, where I'm off topic, let me go back. At the end of the day, the LLM needs to be able to now, you know, it's the base layer. Then you got the next layer, which is just a series of different models. Picking the right model to do the job, and then that model is basically picking the right expert.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With my team a year ago, we'd be in meetings and product meetings and we'd be talking, people would say, you know, let me show you the new Alexa with a demo and they would Alexa speak to it. And it was like, nope Speak normal, like go to natural conversation, don't adjust your speech for Alexa. Like that's exactly what you don't want if you want natural conversation. It's hard, though. You know, you've been training people for years. We've been training ourselves for 10 years. You know, calling a timer is can you set a timer for eight minutes? Calling a timer on the new Alexa is, I'm making a ramen egg. Gotcha. I'll set a timer for eight minutes, like where she just proactively comes back and sets it. I didn't demo that yesterday because I didn't want the timer headline.”
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 there is that element. Sitting on top of an LLM, you're now going, okay, just talking is just not that interesting. Although awesome Like having ambient conversation, I think it's a superpower moving forward for Alexa. It's different today. On Alexa, it's like point, shoot, ask the question, hope to get the answer.”
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 you ask a broader question, but let me just talk about Alexa. You want the element of connecting to thousands and thousands of APIs, partners that you have been connected to Alexa forever. You're trying to manage hundreds of millions of customers who already have the product. You want to update as many of those devices as you possibly can. Meaning you don't want to leave a customer behind. And there will be some devices that are eight, nine years old that won't work, but everything else most things will, like relative to what's used in the market today. So you got to carry forward all that history because people still love Alexa. You know, we're still growing. We still have usage that's higher than you would expect. Can't leave those customers behind. Like that's the worst thing. We focus on not doing that.”
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 not just an LLM. It seems easy. Put a voice to the LLM at the LLM talk or, you know, TTS, bring it out, bring out the voice, or if it's speech to speech, it doesn't matter which tech. If you want the elements of connecting to thousands of, and I'm speaking for 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
“Everyone saw that and said, okay, Siri should work like this, Alexa should work like this, Google Assistant should work like this. And then the actual implementation of it has taken everybody a really long time. What's the gap 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
“Talk about Alexa Plus for just one second and get a sense of it. And then I want to talk about how you made it happen. I think there's a part that seems very obvious to people. You see an LOM, you see it interact with you. You're like, this thing is great at natural language input and output. Maybe it's going to lead us to GI and maybe it's not 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
“It's just like, here's a kid's feature. Please write about it. So putting a little bit of emotion and storytelling in it, those were all real demos that all really happened. That was one of the principles of the event. It wasn't like, let's go make up a fake story and let's see what, you know, we'll just put, you know, film. That was the one area where it was just a video, you know, it was like a, it wasn't a vision piece. It was the product, but it was the only area that wasn't live. And so there was a lot of trepidation. Like it was not this, it was the hardest kind of event we've put together with the risk profile wise.”
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 know, when you're basically doing hardware, you have fallbacks. The demos aren't, they're not live, but you always can just go to the hardware. When you're reinventing a or kind of re-architecting an entire service, there's no backup. It was the product. The only product video we had, like actual video, was the kids portion because it, you know, honestly, you're not kids in the audience. So sharing a kids feature without some emotion is a waste of 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
“Every single part of that show after the moment the mic starts has been, you know, very, very well thought through. Yesterday's event was the highest risk event I've ever done. And that was, yeah, bar n”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we did yesterday as a team was a little bit of a reset. Like the team was pumped to do it, excited. We were never going to announce hardware wasn't a goal. We need reset Alexa for the world and bring Alexa Plus forward. That is a bit of a cultural shift. Like we're just going to focus on the service and what it's going to be. Great products are coming. We already have great products in market. We launched stuff at the holiday. And the team, they rallied. The company rallied. It's pretty awesome. You know, having Andy there's fantastic. You can feel a vibe in that room for sure. I hope you did. Yeah, I mean, you made your snarky comment about the music when you got in there. Like, man, we check every detail. I think I missed, I may have missed. I don't know.”
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 events under your predecessor, Dave Limp, they were entertaining in their way. It was here's a fire hose of stuff with Alexa in it, a microwave, a coffee maker. We would count. We'd be like, they announced 45 products.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't think resetting Amazon. Like, Amazon's incredibly ambitious in so many ways, always learning, changing. I mean, it's pretty powerful. The devices team a little bit. First off, we hadn't really had a large scale event. I don't think, as I understand it, obviously I wasn't there Since pre pandem”
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'm really excited to talk to you. I was sitting in the audience yesterday as you were announcing Alexa Plus. I have a lot of questions about how it works, the feature set, where you think it's going, but it occurred to me as I was sitting there watching you present it. And then later as I was watching some of the demos of it working, that to make it happen had to have required some big structure and culture rethinks inside of Amazon itself. And you joined about a year and a half ago, Dakota is all about structure and culture rethink. So there's a lot here. There's a product to talk about. But then there's the path of getting to that product. Is that how you see it that you had to reset some parts of Amazon to get to Alexa Plus?”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Making all those devices a bit smarter and more capable with AI sounds easy, but actually doing it is fairly hard. And we sat in the weeds of that execution for a while. There's a lot of ideas here, and a lot of different parts of Amazon needed to work together in new ways to bring those ideas to life. That is pure decoderbate. Ponos was game to really get into it. Even got a little emotional at some points. One note before we start, Panos talks about experts a lot and what he means in this context is the individual services that power different parts of the Alexa plus experience, like music or photos. It's kind of like apps on a smartphone. You'll see what I mean as we go through this conversation, but if it gets confusing, just think app and it'll click into place. Okay, Hanos Pinay, head of products and services at Amazon. Here we go.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a big job, but you'll hear Panos say that the idea of infusing Alexa with AI really drew him to Amazon. Like so many folks in tech, he sees AI as a platform shift that will change the way we use computers. And he's very aware that Amazon has a big advantage with the enormous number of Alexa devices that are already being used all over the world.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 month plan required, $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra.”
2025-03-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Amazon’s Panos Panay on the long road to Alexa’s AI overhaul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT