Amazon is developing an AI-powered smartphone

Jakarta (ANTARA) - The technology company Amazon is reportedly developing a smartphone powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

GSM Arena reported on Friday (20/3) local time that this information comes from a Reuters report stating that the phone is internally codenamed “Transformer”. This term refers to the main building blocks for modern large language models (LLMs).

Discussing Amazon’s history with AI, the company was actually one of the early pioneers. However, Amazon is considered to have failed to capitalise on AI’s popularity with its Alexa-powered smart speakers.

In an effort to turn things around, Amazon eventually released generative AI upgrades for Alexa and launched the Alexa+ chatbot last year.

This is not the first time Amazon has developed a phone, as a similar step was taken nearly a decade ago with the Amazon Fire Phone, but the results were underwhelming.

As the latest effort, the “Transformer” phone may be positioned not as a smartphone but rather as a kind of anti-smartphone similar to the Light Phone.

Using AI, the phone will be able to order from Amazon, play content from Prime Video and Prime Music, or order food from Grubhub.

Because it is not a typical smartphone, the phone could help screen addicts combat the habit of endless scrolling. Although Alexa will be a core feature of the phone, it may not be the “main operating system” of the phone, according to internal sources.

The Transformer phone is so far known to be developed by a new division within Amazon called ZeroOne. That division is led by J Allard, who previously worked on Microsoft’s Zune and Xbox.

Amazon has not publicly discussed this project, and the internal sources who spoke to reporters warned that the project could be cancelled if Amazon’s strategy changes or simply because the economy is not performing well.

There is no news yet on the price of the Transformer phone, but rising electronics prices could make the path to profitability difficult.