A few weeks ago OpenAI released GPT-4o ushering in a new standard for multimodal, conversational experiences with sophisticated reasoning capabilities. Several days later, my good friends at PolyAI announced their Series C fundraising round after tremendous growth in the usage of their enterprise voice assistant. Amid this news, a former Alexa colleague messaged me: “You’d think voice assistants would have been our forte at Alexa.” For context, I joined Alexa AI as a research scientist in early ...