“Alexa, let’s chat” — nearly a decade after debuting its voice-activated Echo devices, the e-commerce and cloud juggernaut Amazon today announced that its signature voice assistant Alexa is being upgraded with a new, custom-built large language model (LLM), taking advantage of the generative AI boom in Silicon Valley to give Alexa even more capabilities and human-like conversational qualities.

The news was delivered by David Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president (SVP) of devices…