Amazon Releases Alexa+, Perplexity Finds Its Voice, Figure Is After Your Job, ChatGPT-4.5 This Week!

The AI News for February 26.
Amazon releases their next generation Alexa+ Perplexity delivers their own voice model update. Figure shows how the robots will take Your jobs and ChatGPT-4.5 is coming this week. Here's today's AI news. Amazon have unveiled the next generation of their Alexa assistant, called Alexa+ This latest evolution claims to incorporate LLMs and agentic capabilities to extend the usefulness of its assistant far beyond its current boundaries.

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Amazon will attempt to blend these AI technologies across multiple services to try and deliver a seamless user experience. It's free to all Amazon Prime members and will start rolling out in the US in the next few weeks. Not to be outdone, Perplexity has updated their iOS app with a new voice mode.

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Perplexity claims that this is the only model that can reliably incorporate real time voice and information across several languages simultaneously. Perplexity already has a voice mode, but it was pushed to talk rather than a continuous conversation style. The offering from Perplexity is now looking very polished.

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Figure have revealed a new video of their figure O2 robots working together with their new Helix Neural Network. Last time we saw two robots coordinating to carry out some simple home tasks. In this video there are many robots working in an industrial setting carrying out some picking and sorting tasks that would usually be done by human hand.

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Figure claim that training their second commercial use case took just 30 days. The robots are definitely coming. Finally, the rumours of ChatGPT-4.5 continue to suggest that we'll see the launch happen this week. With some users claiming to have already seen a preview of it. It now seems fairly certain that we will see the release happen this week, with the smart money being on Thursday.