Amazon’s new AI chatbot is designed to be your workplace assistant

Amazon Q can write emails, summarise documents, visualise data, and more
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company's new AI chatbot 'can be tailored to your business'
AP
Saqib Shah30 November 2023

Amazon has unveiled a new artificial intelligence chatbot that it hopes will be your personal office underling.

The bot, known as Amazon Q, is designed to help you save time at work by writing your emails; visualising data; creating professional LinkedIn posts; summarising documents such as PDF files; and providing tailored responses for customer support staff.

Amazon unveiled the bot at an event devoted to its lucrative internet services division earlier this week. The splashy AI launch is the company’s answer to rival business-focused AI assistants from Microsoft and ChatGPT creator OpenAI

For the starting price of $20 (£16) per employee per month, a business can plug Amazon Q into its existing systems to boost productivity, Amazon explained. 

On the surface, the digital helper looks and behaves a lot like ChatGPT. Users can type in questions or upload documents for the bot to answer or summarise. Behind the scenes, it will scour databases, internal style guides, and other connected data sources to power its replies. 

Amazon says it trained the bot on 17 years’ worth of Amazon Web Services expertise. That’s the name for its cloud computing division, which essentially stores the data for large swaths of the internet, from websites to apps.

Massive companies such as Apple and Samsung have banned their employees from using public chatbots such as ChatGPT for fear they may leak their valuable secrets. The likes of Microsoft and business software provider Salesforce have tried to fill that gap by adding AI to their existing workplace tools, which they claim boast more water-tight security.

To that end, Amazon says its digital assistant comes with strict controls. These can prevent employees from accessing information above their pay grades.

Administrators can also restrict the bot from addressing certain topics, and even limit answers to just internal information. This way, the bot won’t use its underlying AI model to inform its answers, which could result in fewer mistakes (or hallucinations as they’re known in tech parlance).

Amazon also said that it won’t use its customers’ data to train its bot, and will give them the option to delete their conversation history.

Like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot before it, Amazon Q also plays nice with other software. The bot can be integrated with workplace chat apps such as Microsoft Teams and Slack, Google Drive, and Salesforce.

Amazon is previewing it in the US before making it more widely available. The company is already using generative AI on its online store for product descriptions and to summarise customer reviews.

In September, it announced an AI-powered upgrade for Alexa that gives the voice assistant conversational abilities.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in