Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

According to a leaked internal document, retail giant Amazon is secretly developing an updated version of its home robot Astro to better understand what it is observing and react more intelligently.

The document shows that the internal code name of the project is "Burnham", and the project adds a layer of "intelligent and conversational voice interface" to Astro. Amazon described the new technology, called situational understanding, as "our latest and most advanced artificial intelligence technology designed to make robots smarter, more useful and more conversational," the document said.

In the documents related to Burnham, Amazon describes an Astro product that sells for $995m. According to the document, "Burnham Plus" with standard home monitoring costs $24.99 a month, while Burnham Plus with Amazon Ring doorbell camera costs $34.99 a month.

Burnham is quite versatile and can support a range of other products. According to the document, the technology "remembers what it sees and understands" and understands deeper meaning from these interactions. It can also use large language model (LLM)-based technologies common in applications such as ChatGPT to talk about what it sees and understand, and take appropriate action on that basis.

For example, if Burnham finds that the fire is not extinguished or the faucet is unattended, it will find its owner and bring it to their attention. If an old man slips in the kitchen, Burnham can help check to make sure he is all right and call someone else to help. If it is an emergency, Burnham will automatically call the appropriate emergency call for help.

The owner can ask Burnham where he has put the key. It can also check whether the kitchen window was open last night and monitor whether the children have friends coming after school.

"to put it simply, our robots already have strong bodies, and the next step is the brain," an internal document wrote. Robots with Burnham can understand the daily trivialities of the family like humans do, without having to code everything because 'common sense' knowledge is implicit in the data on which the language model is based. "

This represents the next stage of Astro's growth. Astro is a home monitoring robot that Amazon has invested a lot of money and is driven by intelligent assistant Alexa, but so far it doesn't seem to live up to Amazon's lofty expectations. Despite years of investment and the efforts of hundreds of people, Astro's capabilities are still mediocre and difficult to buy because it still only accepts invitations, even 18 months after its launch.

With competitors such as Microsoft and Google leading the market in artificial intelligence chatbots, it is also the latest example of Amazon integrating AIGC and LLM technology into its existing products and services. Amazon is reportedly planning to upgrade its Alexa voice technology to ChatGPT-like features, and it also hopes to build artificial intelligence tools to automatically generate pictures and videos for advertisers.

Brian Olsavsky, Amazon's chief financial officer, said last month that more investment was shifting from its core logistics business to such artificial intelligence and LLM technologies.

In an email, an Amazon spokesman said Astro had "a bright start" and that requests for invitations were "still strong", but he did not provide specific figures. The spokesman added: "We are excited about the potential of artificial intelligence technology and look forward to using these technologies to create new experiences for Astro, which will please customers and make their future life easier."

Amazon's development of Burnham was inspired by a large research paper in the field of language modeling. Amazon said in the document that as LLM grew in size, they began to demonstrate "new reasoning and problem-solving skills." When artificial intelligence models make predictions based on new data, reasoning is carried out.

Amazon, for example, has found that with LLM, home robots can not only perform simple tasks, such as finding out whether the light is not off or the door is open. Instead, they can now handle more complex tasks, such as detecting broken glass on the floor, knowing that broken glass is dangerous and needs to be cleaned up before someone steps on it.

Amazon conducted a concept demonstration to test its new home robot's ability to demonstrate reasoning and problem solving. The test was a success. "you can imagine our excitement when we understand what this means for our robots," the company's internal document said. "We know that we still have a long way to go before Burnham is integrated into the product, but we have learned enough to believe it will succeed."

Astro, like other Amazon teams, has faced huge cost pressures over the past year, according to people familiar with the matter. The team cancelled its internal plan to release a low-cost model last year and instead announced a new focus on small business security.

The future Burnham of the Burnham project may not be limited to one product. In an internal document, Amazon defined it as a series of core technologies, not the product itself, and said it expected Burnham to "appear in a range of future robots".

As Amazon tries to shift artificial intelligence technology from the digital world to real-life physical environments, such as entering the home center, Burnham may test the limitations of large language models.

According to the documents, Amazon seems to believe that Burnham is a significantly improved version of home surveillance robots that "reassure families that everything is fine at home."

"Burnham's friendly personality, social awareness and fluent conversation make it very useful and will be popular in any family," the document said. "

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